About the Project
Background and Research Question:
I applied for and received an Off-Cycle Summer Undergraduate Research Grant (OC SURG) through Northwestern's Office of Undergraduate Research. The grant lasts for eight weeks during Northwestern's winter quarter, from January to March 2021. I am conducting the research independently with guidance from a faculty mentor, Professor Tabitha Bonilla.
This grant is a continuation of the Summer Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) I received last summer to conduct research on Chilean women during Chile's 1988 public referendum. Upon completing this project, I could not help but notice patterns in how Augusto Pinochet used media and political propaganda to appeal to his conservative female votes and how Donald Trump used his own social media platforms to connect with his base. Additionally, I observed similarities between the authoritative tactics of these two leaders and how, despite controversy and violence while in office, still retained significant support from conservative female voters. Another key commonality I noticed was how both leaders, even though Pinochet was a dictator, participated in democratic elections asking the public if they should be allowed to serve more years in power; Chile's public referendum (plebiscite, or plebiscito) in October of 1988 and the United States Presidential election in November of 2020.
This surface level similarities have been observed in other literature, yet I found no research examining the extent to which authoritarian tactics played out in political advertising as both Trump and Pinochet sought to retain power in a democratic election. I am interested in examining how what I found in past research regarding the impact of authoritarianism and patriarchal ideals in political propaganda can be used as a lens to analyze the specific ways Trump and Pinochet attempted to maintain female support. This all leads to the question:
In what ways and to what extent did Donald Trump and Augusto Pinochet attempt to appeal to their conservative female supporters by inserting gendered stereotypes rooted in patriarchal ideals in their political advertising?
Research Components
This project is majority qualitative research and analysis of primary and secondary sources. In considering the 1988 Chilean election, I plan to examine primary sources such as newspaper articles, campaign commercials, political posters, campaign flyers and recorded speeches, many of which are housed in the digital archives of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile. Primary sources for the 2020 American election include videos of President Trump's campaign speeches, short campaign videos from YouTube.com, and archives of President Trump's personal Twitter account via Factba.se (as of writing this on January 11, 2021, Twitter has suspended Trump's personal account @RealDonaldTrump and tweets cannot be accessed on that site). A complete list of planned sources can be found in the grant linked at the bottom of this page.
I plan to spend the first few weeks of the grant reading through these primary and secondary sources, taking notes on the intended audience, tone and general message of each piece. Once these notes have been taken, I will begin the process of identifying repeating themes and patterns across mediums, creating a qualitative coding scheme. This coding scheme will allow me to identify broader themes and rhetorical techniques used by both men in appealing to their female bases as relates to gendered stereotypes of female submission under patriarchal systems.
Website, Blog and Social Media
Given the timely nature of this research, I decided to create a media presence for myself during this project. I plan to write blog posts about my research process, how I am seeing my research connect to current events both in the United States and Chile and other topics I deem relevant. I will be using Twitter as a means to interact with other researchers and members of the Northwestern community. This site will serve as a way to combine these efforts in one main platform in addition to providing more information about the grant, myself and my past research endeavors.
