Different Strategic Narratives in the Posts of Men and Women Politicians from Ukraine

And the final speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Alexandra Pavliuc, whose interest is in the impact of gender in diplomatic communications between Ukraine and the West following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While much of the focus has also been on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public persona, women have played a substantially larger part in public diplomacy by Ukraine on social media (and especially Twitter) since the invasion, and their use of such media has been distinctly different.

There are 461 MPs in the Ukrainian parliament, of whom 20% are women; there is solid literature on women in Ukraine, but this needs to be refreshed further for the present context, and historically women’s voices have often been excluded from wartime histories and narratives. Scholarship intersection of gender and political communication also needs to be further extended.

This study therefore focusses on the strategic narratives employed in digital diplomacy, directed perhaps especially at engaging with major western powers, sustaining alliances, and defeating military opponents. The role of women may be distinct here because women’s public communication can tend to be more peace-oriented than men’s (but this may be different during wartime conflict situations), and because there may be a gender affinity effect where women’s communication might be more effective for women’s recipients.

Alexandra’s analysis draws on some 13 months of tweets by Ukrainian and western politicians, gathering some 316,000 tweets and distinguishing these accounts between women and men (other genders were not present). Western politicians were included if Ukrainian politicians mentioned them at least ten times, and their tweets were filtered for Ukraine-relevant terms. This was then processed using structural topic modelling, which identified 50 key topics and assessed their prevalence over time amongst women and men. Alexandra interpreted each of the topics for their theme, narrative, and strategic intent.

Men focussed more on topics related to diplomacy, military support, and the strength of the Ukrainian military; women more on Russian war crimes and the destruction of Ukrainian land and people; there was more affinity of topics within than across genders, too. However, the strategic narrative intent of women’s topics was still mostly for more western military support and solidarity for Ukraine. Both gender groups therefore contributed to the same strategic effort, but in different ways, and this might be a more or less conscious effort by women politicians to contribute in a distinct way to the strategic diplomatic effort. Some of these might also seek to directly respond to Russian war propaganda.