Female candidates face a messaging challenge. There is a strong association between masculinity and political leadership. Stressing masculinity can result in a likability backlash for female candidates often seen as lacking feminine qualities, such as warmth. Preventing a likability backlash by highlighting feminine qualities can also harm female candidates. Current scholarship offers conflicting conclusions about how female candidates balance these gendered challenges. We fill this empirical and theoretical gap with a trait-balancing theory clarifying how and when female candidates use feminine and masculine traits to manage competing expectations. We use original data merging information on candidate advertising strategies across three election cycles. We show that female candidates strategically balance masculine and feminine stereotypes in ways that often differ from their male counterparts but also differ based on female candidate partisanship and incumbency. These results are consequential because they highlight how female candidates manage gendered pressures in campaign strategies, which can affect their ability to win elections and, ultimately, women’s representation in government.
Bias accusations have eroded trust in journalism to impartially check facts. Traditionally journalists have avoided responding to such accusations, resulting in an imbalanced flow of arguments about the news media. This study tests what would happen if journalists spoke up more in defense of their profession, while simultaneously also testing effects of doing more fact checking. A five-day field experiment manipulated whether an online news portal included fact check stories and opinion pieces defending journalism. Fact checking was beneficial in terms of three democratically desirable outcomes–media trust, epistemic political efficacy, and future news use intent–only when defense of journalism stories were also present. No partisan differences were found in effects: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents were all affected alike. These results have important implications for journalistic practice as well as for theories and methods of news effects.
President Donald Trump faced substantial scandal coverage early in his presidency. Can these stories about presidential controversies change the opinions of Trump’s fellow Republicans, or are the efforts of the news media to inform partisans about prominent issues futile? Past research on partisan reactions to major political scandals were confounded by problems with self-reported media use and single-shot experimental treatments. We address these concerns using a unique, repeated-exposure experimental design that either randomly supplied participants with news about the Trump-Russia scandal, or removed most of those stories from view, over the course of one week in June 2017. This design mimics sustained media attention to a political scandal and disentangles the effects of media coverage from selection in the context of a high-choice media environment. We find that Republicans randomly assigned to see more Trump-Russia headlines reacted more negatively than Democrats or Independents, rating Trump’s performance lower and expressing more negative emotions about him. Republicans’ perceptions of media bias were not affected by Trump-Russia stories, and effects were not contingent upon clicking the articles. Intense media focus on a story can alter partisans’ evaluations of politicians by shifting the balance of headlines.
What happens when news aggregators tailor their newsfeeds to include partisan news aimed at users with a known party preference? Relying on a custom-made news portal featuring real, timely articles, this study examines the influence of partisan news sources on participant headline exposure, clicks on news stories to read, and perceptions about the portal’s ability to reliably and comprehensively provide the most important news of the day. Over a period of 12 days, participants preferring either the Republican or Democratic party were randomly assigned to newsfeeds containing increased dosages of real news articles from sources supportive of the participant’s preferred party. Results demonstrate that partisan personalization can benefit a news aggregator by increasing usage and perceptions of its quality, while potentially harming society by decreasing attention to high-quality mainstream sources.
We develop and test a theory of gendered political times, which argues that the gendered political climate during an election shapes the extent to which female candidates emphasize feminine or masculine traits in campaign messages. We measure gendered electoral contexts through rigorous analyses of public opinion data and news media content of the top issues during an election, and we complement these data with an analysis of the gendered traits candidates emphasize in campaign messages during U.S. congressional election cycles from 2000 through 2018. Our results suggest that feminine electoral contexts do not necessarily lead female candidates, or male candidates, to rely on feminine traits. We find that masculine electoral contexts lead female candidates to rely more heavily on feminine traits. Our results have important implications for understanding the forces that shape the way candidates develop strategic campaign messages, and the factors that ultimately influence women’s under-representation in politics.
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