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Julie and the cybermums: marketing and women voters in the UK 2010 General Election

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journal contribution
posted on 2013-10-28, 13:51 authored by Emily Harmer, Dominic WringDominic Wring
Certain groups of female voters have long been recognised as potentially vital to deciding the outcome of elections. This paper explores and compares efforts made by the British Conservatives to focus on addressing the concerns of mothers with children. The party made a significant attempt to cultivate this kind of woman during the 2010 campaign through the use of a lay person, Julie, whose personal testimony and image was central to this effort. Here comparisons are drawn with the intriguingly similar figure of Sylvia used by the Conservatives 40 years before. Discussion also focuses on another important gendered aspect of the election relating to the growth of new social media platforms and, more especially, how they are represented through the still important medium of agenda-setting newspapers to promote certain perspectives that can be highly partisan in their selectivity if not their intent.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Citation

HARMER, E. and WRING, D., 2013. Julie and the cybermums: marketing and women voters in the UK 2010 General Election. Journal of Political Marketing, 12 (2-3), pp. 262 - 273

Publisher

© Taylor and Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2013

Notes

This article was published in the serial Journal of Political Marketing [© Taylor and Francis]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2013.781472

ISSN

1537-7857

eISSN

1537-7865

Language

  • en