Den raka och kompetenta kronprinsessan

The purpose of this essay is to study the media framing of Swedish minister of finance Magdalena Andersson during the fall of 2021, when she was the primary candidate for the role as the leader for the Social Democratic Party and later became Sweden’s first female prime minister.

The essay will study the media representation of Andersson from three Swedish newspapers: “Aftonbladet”, “Dagens Nyheter” and “Svenska Dagbladet”. The focus in this study is how the media representation of Magdalena Andersson is affected by her sex, since no woman in Swedish politics has ever had the role as prime minister. The essay investigates the news coverage from three main Swedish newspapers, from the candidacy to the election. The study is based on a quantitative content analysis of the presence, focus and description of Magdalena Andersson and has coded the articles based on variables in SPSS. The variables are taken from theories of framing and gender. The three different newspapers have different political roots. “Aftonbladet” is independent social democratic, “Dagens Nyheter” is independent liberal and “Svenska Dagbladet” is independent moderate. We have chosen newspapers with varying political positions to investigate possible differences in framing of Magdalena Andersson that could depend on political roots.

Results: One result was that November was the month with the most articles. We found that logical
considering the large and important political events which involved Magdalena Andersson during that month, she had to be approved as prime minister twice. We did find various adjectives in the
articles we studied, but we thought we would find more adjectives than we did. However, the
adjectives we did find, some of them, can be described as only being used on females or female
politicians. We suspect the lack of major focus on Anderssons gender has to do with the focus on
the political work she had as minister of finance and party leader.