Loes Aaldering is an associate professor in Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the VU Amsterdam. Her research mainly focuses on issues related to gender and politics, political leadership, political representation and electoral behavior. More specifically, she studies, among other things, how politicians are discussed in the media in terms of their leadership traits; gender differences in media coverage of politicians; (gendered) leadership effects on voters; gender stereotypes; sexism during election campaigns; dark politicians; gender and negative campaigning; fake news; news avoidance; immersive journalism and (affective) polarization. Loes is the research manager for the department of Political Science and Public Administration, an associate editor for Frontiers in Political Science and serves as a board member for the ECPR standing group on Political Communication and the Nederlanse Kring voor de Wetenschap der Politiek and she is affiliated with the VU Gender Research Network.
Loes has been awarded a VENI grant from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for her research project ‘Seeing the bigger picture. The impact of gender stereotypes in politicians’ textual and visual media coverage on voters’. From 2021 onwards, she studies to what extent gender stereotypes are applied in the visual media coverage of politicians and how the gender stereotypical portrayal of politicians in textual and visual media coverage affects citizens in their information processing and political attitudes.
Before she started at the VU Amsterdam, Loes Aaldering was a Postdoctoral researcher in Political Communication at the University of Vienna and she wrote her dissertation called 'Images with Impact. The Electoral Consequences of Party leader Portrayal in the Media' at the University of Amsterdam. She received a NWO grant that financed her PhD project, a Fulbright grant that funded a 4-month research visit at the Ohio State University, and a grant from the Österreichische Nationalbank (ÖNB) for a research project on immersive journalism.
Her work has been published in a wide range of international journals, such as the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Press/Politics, Political Behavior, Digital Journalism, Electoral Studies, Political Studies, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Frontiers in Political Science, Mass Communication and Society, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Politics and Governance, Journalism, Journal of Language and Politics, Journalism Practice, Quality and Quantity and Journalism Studies.
You can contact Loes Aaldering at l.aaldering@vu.nl
