He Said, She Said: The Impact of Candidate Gender in Negative Campaigns

Abstract

Although there is evidence that negative advertising “works” at least some of the time, it has been suggested that going negative poses a special risk for female candidates because it violates expectations about appropriate behavior that are rooted in the traditional gender stereotypes still held by many voters. In this paper, we employ data from a survey experiment to examine gender differences in the effectiveness of one particular attack made by a challenger against an incumbent of the opposite sex in a hypothetical race for the U.S. House of Representatives. Our interest is not limited to the attack itself, however, but extends to the question of how candidates should respond when they are attacked and whether certain types of responses/rebuttals (including counterattacks) work better for men than they do for women, and vice versa, in terms of mitigating the damage inflicted by an initially successful negative ad. Overall, we find little support for the idea that the effectiveness of either attack or response (denial, counterattack, counterimaging, justification, accusing one's opponent of mudslinging) varies significantly according to candidate gender. Further, shared partisanship matters more than shared gender in shaping how voters react to the campaign messages of male and female candidates.

Negative Political Communication on Social Media and the Gender Gap: A Study of Men's and Women's Reactions to Presidential Candidate Attacks on Facebook in 2012 and 2016

“…For example, female targets with higher favorability ratings might magnify the gap. Further research should therefore seek to ascertain whether the effect on social media is stronger for more popular or less known candidates and would also benefit from considering shared voter and candidate gender in such models (see, e.g., Craig and Rippere 2016). New evidence suggests female candidates are more likely to adopt social media platforms in congressional races (Wagner, Gainous, and Holman 2017), leaving future researchers with many potential subjects for observation.…”

“…Further complicating matters, little consensus can be gleaned from this small collection of (potentially) appropriately specified work. Some, for example, offer evidence that casts doubt on whether men and women differ at all in their receptiveness to negativity (e.g., Garramone 1984;Goldstein and Freedman 2002), including when such voters share the gender of the attacker or not (e.g., Craig and Rippere 2016). Others demonstrate that women are repulsed by negativity (e.g., Kern and Just 1997), a finding which also tends to coincide with evidence that men are indifferent to attacks.…”

Gender Differences in Negative Campaigning: The Impact of Party Environments

“…By contrast, research from Fridkin, Kenney, and Woodall (2009) suggests that the evaluations of women candidates are less negatively affected by attacks. In another study, Craig and Rippere (2013) do not find much evidence for gender-specific effects of negative messages. However, Krupnikov and Bauer (2014) show that there is a conditional impact of candidate gender.…”

Political Trust and Negative Campaigns: Two Tests of the Figure‐Ground Hypothesis

“…The research described here is part of a larger project where we assess the effectiveness not only of attacks but of various types of responses (or rebuttals) that a candidate might make in an effort to mitigate the damage inflicted when his or her opponent decides to go negative. See Craig, Rippere, and Grayson (); Craig and Rippere ().…”

“…It should be noted that all of the hypothetical office‐seekers in the laboratory phase of our research are men; this was a practical decision necessitated by the complexity of our design, and by earlier studies indicating that some voters react differently to attacks made by and against male and female candidates (Fridkin, Kenney, and Woodall ; Hitchon and Chang ; Schultz and Pancer ). Testing just one attack ad in the Internet survey phase made it feasible for us to vary candidate gender, with Republican/Democratic women attacking Democratic/Republican men and vice versa; this aspect is explored more fully in Craig and Rippere ().…”