In this paper, we present a methodological contribution to the field of personal reputation studies. We do this by proposing analytical categories for looking at how personal reputation is constructed in a political context. To this end, we chose three women political leaders who were recognized as journalistic sources by the most widely-circulated newspapers in Ecuador, El Universo and El Comecio. These women were Lourdes Tiban, Cynthia Viteri, and Nathalie Cely. Out of a corpus of 2203 news stories we obtained a stratified sample of 328 publications. And these, in turn, were subjected to a textual analysis. We hoped to understand how newspapers were portraying these women's reputation and leadership from technical, psycho-emotional, and ethical vantage points. After our media analysis, we carried out semistructured and in-depth interviews with all three women and their inner circles. And through a textual analysis, we looked at how these women perceived their own reputation and leadership, and at how they were seen by those closest to them. We then conducted a methodological triangulation, combining the results of our media analysis and our interviews. The result was an analytical model framed within the theory of social influence and perception management. This resulting model seeks to identify strategies of assertive communication that influence the construction of personal reputation in a political context. Our findings suggest that these women employ assertive and defensive tactics in constructing their reputation. We also found that being confrontational was a common trait among these women, which contradicts classic stereotypes of femininity.
