Francesca Maddii, Marie Sonnet, Kirstine Bunde-P, Silvia Alfaro, Laura Faure

In times of crisis, people turn to governments and their leaders for reassurance, comfort, and security. During the global pandemic of Covid-19, leaders took onto traditional and new media to communicate with the public, oftentimes in very effective ways, resulting in them sometimes gaining both the approval and the “affection” of the citizens. Given the diversity of our group, we decided to focus our attention on the leaders of our countries during 2020, and how the public, through comments on social media, perceived their frequent presence on their TVs or other devices. Based on our countries, the respective prime ministers were: Giuseppe Conte (Italy) M; Pedro Sanchez (Spain) M; Mette Frederiksen (Denmark) F; Sophie Wilmes (Belgium) F. We have noticed substantial differences between the genders, noticing how people started idolizing their male leaders compared to how weary and critical they became if their prime minister was a woman. The project outcome is an interactive infographic/presentation: the user can interact with the information given, move across the presentation in a dynamic and interesting way, while still being able to read and learn about the discrepancies in public perception of male and female leaders. The topic is highly relevant, as public perception can make or break the credibility and professionality of a political figure. Observing as one’s opinions and bias can change based on the gender of the politician in question is an issue worth discussing, given the ongoing discrimination that women in positions of power in politics are subject to.

Eva Luna Villanova, Matteo Doldo, Eleonora Ricci, Margarita Kustiaeva, Nargiza Zhukabayeva, Silvia Cattelan, Indira Adambayeva

This project aims to compare two very different, but in some ways also very similar women in power: Giorgia Meloni, the Italian premier, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, also known as AOC and a US politician. Far from focusing on the different ideals that these two women represent - the former is right-wing, the latter left-wing - our aim is to show how these two women use social networks to communicate with the public and how their way of communicating can have an effect on the country and on political elections. We chose this theme because we think that nowadays it is extremely important to be able to communicate via social media and because this new way of communication is very different from traditional ones; both of these women have succeeded in their intent and in creating a network of followers who in one way or another manage to understand and keep up with the Main Voice of the two female politicians they have decided to support and follow. The research question guiding our study is whether there are any correlations between the way these two women use social media and their political success, by considering also the theme of intersectionality. For this purpose, we searched for different examples of these two women's communication on different social media, limiting the search to Twitter and Instagram, which we considered to be the most used social media in the political field. This is because both Instagram and Twitter are the most widely used tools in general at the moment, and they are the platforms where all kinds of news can be read every day. We decided to exclude TikTok, for example, because it is a newer social media platform, but less dedicated to the political cause; despite this, Giorgia Meloni uses this platform to showcase her campaign; however, Cortez does not use TikTok directly (there are only fan-reported videos) and so we opted for two online platforms used by both of our women, so that both contexts could be analyzed equally. Starting precisely from Twitter, which works with a "trending news" mechanism, we were able to find the right material for our research. In fact, both Giorgia Meloni and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez use these social networks to talk about their politics and ideals, in a completely different way! Right from here, we combined the material we found, created the 3 podcasts, the website, and by analyzing the information we found, we answered the research question we had set for ourselves.