Candidate Aggression and Gendered Voter Evaluations

Bauer, Nichole M.; Kalmoe, Nathan P.; Russell, Erica B.

doi:10.1111/pops.12737

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 62 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Voters form gender-biased impressions of candidates (Bauer 2015a) and penalise women for appearing to be too ambitious (Okimoto and Brescoll 2010) or negative (Cassese and Holman 2018), while rewarding them for displays of happiness (Boussalis et al 2021). These penalties are more acute when the campaign environment is characterised by ‘masculine’ issues (Holman, Merolla and Zechmeister 2016) and are more commonly applied by low-attention voters (Bauer 2015b) and voters with sexist attitudes (Mo 2015) or aggressive personalities (Bauer, Kalmoe and Russell 2021). By contrast, voters are less sensitive to role-inconsistent behaviour by male politicians (Okimoto and Brescoll 2010).…”

Section: Gender Stereotypes and Debating Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK

Hargrave

Blumenau

2022

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

show abstract

Section: Gender Stereotypes and Debating Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK

Hargrave

Blumenau

2022

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, to limit the cost of diverting from the gender stereotype (which may cause prejudice and hurt their goals), female politicians will try to be as polite as possible. In turn, their male colleagues are expected to employ more incivility due to the agentic nature of incivility not being costly for them (Bauer et al, 2022;Goovaerts & Turkenburg, 2021). Furthermore, I also expect female targets to be less likely to receive an uncivil attack since campaigning studies show that the presence of women in political debates lowers incivility (Maier & Renner, 2018).…”

Section: Attack Politics In Parliaments: Gender Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Gender in Parliamentary Attacks and Incivility

Poljak

2022

PaG

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It has been well established that politicians attack their competitors to reach their political goals. As such, there is a considerable amount of literature on their attack behaviour. However, this literature almost exclusively investigates attack behaviour during campaigns, and so far, few studies have addressed the nature of attacks during more routine times in parliaments. This article aims to fill this gap by examining in-parliament attack behaviour and, more specifically, the gender characteristics of attacks. It is theorised that women are less likely to attack and be attacked than men due to the stereotypical gender roles. However, it is anticipated that this compliance to stereotypes diminishes as proximity to elections increases, resulting in women engaging in attacks as much as men. To limit the cost of their divergence, attacks employed by and toward women are expected to be more civil. Lastly, this study argues that adherence to gender stereotypes is stronger in countries with candidate-centred parliamentary systems than party-centred ones. This study finds support for the theoretical framework using longitudinal data on individual attacks in the parliaments of Belgium, Croatia, and the UK. Results confirm that politicians adhere to gender stereotypical roles in parliaments, with women attacking and being targeted less than men, and when women do attack or are targeted, less incivility is employed. Proximity to elections makes both women and men more hostile, but women lower the cost of their increasing attack behaviour by using less incivility, unlike men who increasingly opt for uncivil attacks closer to elections. Additionally, these findings strongly apply in the candidate-centred system of the UK, whereas in the party-centred system of Belgium and Croatia, hardly any support for the theory can be found.

show abstract

“…In this paper, we focus on how how gender shapes the political communication of public elites by constraining the presentation of emotions. Drawing on theories of personalization (McGregor 2018), emotional labor (Hochschild 1983), and gendered leadership style (Brescoll 2016), and role congruity (Bauer, Kalmoe and Russell 2022), we argue that gender constrains the emotions that men and women express in public (Bucy 2016, Masch 2020, which includes women expressing more happiness and men fewer emotions overall and more anger.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mad, sad, but mostly glad: how men and women in politics communicate using emotions in images

Boussalis¹,

Coan²,

Holman³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Political leaders use emotions to attract support from voters, take positions on issues or policies, and enhance communication. Yet men and women are constrained by gender role expectations, which limit the range and type of acceptable emotions that a leader can express. In this paper, we examine how gender shapes the political communication of emotion through a new measure: emotional expression in images posted by leaders on social media. We examine more than 450,000 Facebook posts by Members of Congress (MOCs), extracting images from these posts, faces from those images, and identifying MOCs faces out to identify when MOCs post images of themselves as angry, happy, or expressing any emotion at all. Specifically, we develop a custom facial recognition model to identify MOCs in their social media imagery and use a convolutional neural network to detect emotional displays. Drawing on research on role congruity, we argue (and find) that women MOCs will post more images of themselves being happy and expressing any emotion and fewer images of themselves as angry. The project offers an opportunity to understand how political leaders use emotions and images to communicate to constituents and how gender shapes these strategic actions.

show abstract

Candidate Aggression and Gendered Voter Evaluations

Cited by 8 publications

References 62 publications

No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK

No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK

The Role of Gender in Parliamentary Attacks and Incivility

Mad, sad, but mostly glad: how men and women in politics communicate using emotions in images

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About