MEDIA AND WOMAN : PICTURING MEDIA CONSTRUCTION TOWARDS WOMAN POLITICAL PARTISIPATION IN POST REFORMATION AGE IN INDONESIA

This research aims to unravel the construction conducted by Kompas toward the news on Female Legislative Candidates in 2009 Legislative Election in post-reformation setting. Indonesia has undergone reformation since 12 years ago but the relation of women and politics is still much disputed and debated in the economic, social, cultural and religious contexts. Women often occupy marginalized positions in the political world, also in socio-cultural domain. Since Indonesia got its independence, the number of women in legislative institutions is not representative if it is compared to the total number of women in Indonesia. Through this study, researchers want to see more the key issues that have consistently raised by Kompas in its news related to womens political participation. This research contributes knowledge about media construction and ideology related to woman’s political participation issue in post reformation era in Indonesia. As the media industry, Kompas is deliberately chosen as the research subject because of its national coverage scale and its dominating circulation. In the socio-cultural domain, Kompas also often offers ideas and discourses that give a lot of influence on the society. The method used in this research is Framing proposed by Gamson and Modigliani who divided the model into Framing and Reasoning. This research found that texts in Kompas promote political participation of women in Indonesia as the Indonesian development resources. In addition, the researchers also found that there are three main obstacles for the realization of increased representation of women expressed by Kompas namely: patriarchal culture that has marginalized women in the political space; culture of money politics which restricts women to enter the political domain without the availability of large capital, and the political and electoral systems in Indonesia which are not conducive to womens political participation