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The issue of the representation of women in politics has received increasing global attention in recent years. This article discusses the representation of female politicians in the Czech daily press, contrasted to that of male politicians. It uses corpus methods to investigate the extent to which the image of women in politics in Czech media is stereotypical. The study is based on adjectival collocations of two lexemes: politik "male politician" and politička "female politician." The research uses a subset of the SYN corpus, which contains texts published in six different editions of Czech daily newspapers from 1991 to 2014. Two case studies were carried out: one focuses on the positive and negative connotations of premodifiers collocating with the target lexemes to reveal the similarities and dissimilarities between male and female politicians; the other investigates the top 20 collocates for both lexemes with attention to tokens that capture the nature of prevailing discourse. This study brings new insight into this area in contrast to similar studies that highlight gender differences: the behavior of the adjectival collocates of the two target lexemes reveals a more complex picture of gender image. It shows similarities rather than differences between men and women in politics and projects a "non-stereotypical" image of female politicians. These attribute properties are more subtle than outright stereotypes. What is more, in some spheres women are represented as having potential, although they are also represented as already holding power.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-98017-1_9

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