Personalization, emotion and closeness. A strategy to catch women´s vote during an electoral year

Abstract

Facing the growth of an emotional culture that puts into practice new ways of communication, the leaders of the main political parties approve the reinforcement of the personalization through empathy to sway the undecided votes. According to the surveys by the Sociological Studies’ Center (CIS, by its initials in Spanish), women are the largest undecided voter bloc and because of this, new strategies to convince these voters, supposedly less attracted to politics, are being developed. In the current setting, this research focuses on the information from interviews of Spanish Presidential candidates published in four of the five most published highest-end female magazines between 2011 and 2015: Glamour, Telva, Elle and Vogue. The goal is to find out what issues candidates are talking about to try and reach this diverse target audience that, at the same time, is already so well defined. Additionally, through the analysis of twelve interviews accompanied by 49 pictures, it’s inferred that values and interests traditionally linked to women (feminine issues) are the ones that have more presence in the speech. However, if we pay attention to professional and electoral messages, the most present issues are the ones included in the category of soft politics.