Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T06:35:58.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2019

Justin Bonest Phillips Open the ORCID record for Justin Bonest Phillips [Opens in a new window]
Justin Bonest Phillips*
Affiliation:
University of Waikato
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Do men and women respond differently to negative political communication? Only a limited collection of studies into the effects of negative campaigns have investigated this research question, and the conflicting results produced from such studies have prevented the development of a widely accepted answer. As campaigns transition to new media environments, further problems arise, as any potential gender gap may be magnified on the new political communication battlefield of social media. The present article contributes to this sparsely investigated area through an empirical study of men's and women's reactions on Facebook to US presidential candidate attacks during two general election campaigns (2012 and 2016) and two primaries (2016 Democratic and Republican). Across nearly 400 million reactions and 40 million unique users, women demonstrate lower receptivity to candidate attacks than men. Two potential explanatory factors for the gap are examined, but neither fully captures the magnitude of the differences observed. Conceptualizing the gender gap composition in terms of differential receptivity most accurately explains these findings and potentially resolves the competing explanations for the gap within the existing literature.

Keywords

Negative political communicationcandidate attacksgender gapdifferential receptivityFacebooksocial mediapresidential campaignspolitical behavior
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 454 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Edward Elder and Victoria Woodman for their helpful research assistance and editing of earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, along with the incoming and outgoing editorial team, for their insightful guidance and support.

References

REFERENCES

Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Gerber, Alan. 1994. “The Mismeasure of Campaign Spending: Evidence from the 1990 U.S. House Elections.” Journal of Politics 56 (4): 1106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Iyengar, Shanto. 1995. Going Negative. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, Iyengar, Shanto, and Simon, Adam. 1999. “Replication Experiments Using Aggregate and Survey Data: The Case of Negative Advertising and Turnout.” American Political Science Review 93 (4): 901–909.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Archer, John. 2004. “Sex Differences in Aggression in Real-World Settings: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Review of General Psychology 8 (4): 291–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Archer, John, and Coyne, Sarah M.. 2005. “An Integrated Review of Indirect, Relational, and Social Aggression.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9 (3): 212–230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Atkin, Charles, Greenberg, Bradley, Korzenny, Felipe, and McDermott, Steven. 1979. “Selective Exposure to Televised Violence.” Journal of Broadcasting 23 (1): 5–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Björkqvist, Kaj. 1994. “Sex Differences in Physical, Verbal, and Indirect Aggression: A Review of Recent Research.” Sex Roles 30 (3–4): 177–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackwell, Matthew. 2013. “A Framework for Dynamic Causal Inference in Political Science.” American Journal of Political Science 57 (2): 504–520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bode, Leticia. 2017. “Closing the Gap: Gender Parity in Political Engagement on Social Media.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (4): 587–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brambor, Thomas, Clark, William Roberts, and Golder, Matt. 2006. “Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses.” Political Analysis 14 (1): 63–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Deborah Jordan, and Murov, Michael. 2012. “Assessing Accountability in a Post-Citizens United Era: The Effects of Attack Ad Sponsorship by Unknown Independent Groups.” American Politics Research 40 (3): 383–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Deborah Jordan. 2006. “The Resilient Voter: Moving Toward Closure in the Debate over Negative Campaigning and Turnout.” Journal of Politics 68 (3): 684–696.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Deborah Jordan. 2010. “A Negativity Gap? Voter Gender, Attack Politics, and Participation in American Elections.” Politics & Gender 6 (3): 319–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Deborah Jordan, and Geer, John G.. 2007. “Beyond Negativity: The Effects of Incivility on the Electorate.” American Journal of Political Science 51 (1): 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conway, Bethany Anne, Kenski, Kate, and Wang, Di. 2013. “Twitter Use by Presidential Primary Candidates during the 2012 Campaign.” American Behavioral Scientist 57 (11): 1596–1610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craig, Stephen C., and Hill, David B.. 2011. The Electoral Challenge: Theory Meets Practice. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press.Google Scholar
Craig, Stephen C., and Rippere, Paulina S.. 2016. “He Said, She Said: The Impact of Candidate Gender in Negative Campaigns.” Politics & Gender 12 (2): 391–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crick, Nicki R., and Grotpeter, Jennifer K.. 1995. “Relational Aggression, Gender, and Social-Psychological Adjustment.” Child Development 56 (3): 710–722.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diener, Ed, and Iran-Nejad, Ashgar. 1986. “The Relationship in Experience between Various Types of Affect.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (5): 1031–1038.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dijck, José van. 2013. “ ‘You Have One Identity’: Performing the Self on Facebook and LinkedIn.” Media, Culture & Society 35 (2): 199–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dolan, Kathleen A. 2014. When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dowling, Conor M., and Wichowsky, Amber. 2015. “Attacks without Consequence? Candidates, Parties, Groups, and the Changing Face of Negative Advertising.” American Journal of Political Science 59 (1): 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elder, Edward, and Phillips, Justin B.. 2017. “Appeals to the Hispanic Demographic: Targeting through Facebook Autoplay Videos by the Clinton Campaign during the 2015/2016 Presidential Primaries.” Journal of Political Marketing 16 (3–4): 319–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2017.1377140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Facebook. 2015. “The Value of Video for Brands.” https://www.facebook.com/business/news/value-of-video.Google Scholar
Filimonov, Kirill, Russmann, Uta, and Svensson, Jakob. 2016. “Picturing the Party: Instagram and Party Campaigning in the 2014 Swedish Elections.” Social Media + Society 2 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116662179CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finkel, Steven E., and Geer, John G.. 1998. “A Spot Check: Casting Doubt on the Demobilizing Effect of Attack Advertising.” American Journal of Political Science 42 (2): 573–595.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiscella, Kevin, and Fremont, Allen M.. 2006. “Use of Geocoding and Surname Analysis to Estimate Race and Ethnicity.” Health Services Research 41 (4 Pt 1): 1482–1500.Google ScholarPubMed
Fowler, Erika Franklin, and Ridout, Travis N.. 2013. “Negative, Angry, and Ubiquitous: Political Advertising in 2012.” Forum 10 (4): 51–61.Google Scholar
Fowler, Erika Franklin, Ridout, Travis N., and Franz, Michael M.. 2016. “Political Advertising in 2016: The Presidential Election as Outlier?” Forum 14 (4): 445–469.Google Scholar
Fox, Richard Logan. 1997. Gender Dynamics in Congressional Elections. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franzese, Robert J. 2003. “Quantitative Empirical Methods and the Context-Conditionality of Classic and Modern Comparative Politics.” CP: Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Organized Section of the American Political Science Association 14 (1): 20–24.Google Scholar
Fridkin, Kim, and Kenney, Patrick. 2004. “Do Negative Messages Work? The Impact of Negativity on Citizens’ Evaluations of Candidates.” American Politics Research 32 (5): 570–605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fridkin, Kim, and Kenney, Patrick. 2011. “Variability in Citizens’ Reactions to Different Types of Negative Campaigns.” American Journal of Political Science 55 (2): 307–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fridkin, Kim, and Kenney, Patrick. 2019. Taking Aim at Attack Advertising: Understanding the Impact of Negative Campaigning in U.S. Senate Races. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedrich, Robert J. 1982. “In Defense of Multiplicative Terms in Multiple Regression Equations.” American Journal of Political Science 26 (4): 797.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gainous, Jason, Marlowe, Adam David, and Wagner, Kevin M.. 2013. “Traditional Cleavages or a New World: Does Online Social Networking Bridge the Political Participation Divide?” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26 (2): 145–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garramone, Gina M. 1984. “Voter Responses to Negative Political Ads.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 61: 250–259.Google Scholar
Geer, John Gray. 2006. In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldstein, Ken, and Freedman, Paul. 2002. “Campaign Advertising and Voter Turnout: New Evidence for a Stimulation Effect.” Journal of Politics 64 (3): 721–740.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottfried, Jeffrey, Barthel, Michael, and Mitchell, Amy. 2018. “Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News.” http://www.journalism.org/2017/01/18/trump-clinton-voters-divided-in-their-main-source-for-election-news/.Google Scholar
Gray, Tricia J., Gainous, Jason, and Wagner, Kevin M.. 2017. “Gender and the Digital Divide in Latin America.” Social Science Quarterly 98 (1): 326–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, William L., Clark, Kevin, Leskovec, Jure, and Jurafsky, Dan. 2016. “Inducing Domain-Specific Sentiment Lexicons from Unlabeled Corpora.” ArXiv Preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02820CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herrnson, Paul S., and Lucas, Jennifer C.. 2006. “The Fairer Sex?: Gender and Negative Campaigning in U.S. Elections.” American Politics Research 34 (1): 69–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. 2000. Everything You Know about Politics Is Wrong. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Kahn, Kim Fridkin. 1993. “Gender Differences in Campaign Messages: The Political Advertisements of Men and Women Candidates for US Senate.” Political Research Quarterly 46 (3): 481–502.Google Scholar
Kahn, Kim Fridkin. 1996. The Political Consequences of Being a Woman: How Stereotypes Influence the Conduct and Consequences of Political Campaigns. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Kahn, Kim Fridkin, and Kenney, Patrick J.. 2004. No Holds Barred: Negativity in U.S. Senate Campaign. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Kam, Cindy D., and Franzese, Robert J.. 2007. Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Kamhawi, Rasha, and Grabe, Maria Elizabeth. 2008. “Engaging the Female Audience: An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective on Gendered Responses to News Valence Frames.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 52 (1): 33–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kern, Montague, and Just, Marion. 1997. “A Gender Gap Among Viewers?” In Women, Media, and Politics, ed. Norris, Pippa. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kikas, Eve, Peets, Kätlin, Tropp, Kristiina, and Hinn, Maris. 2009. “Associations Between Verbal Reasoning, Normative Beliefs About Aggression, and Different Forms of Aggression.” Journal of Research on Adolescence 19 (1): 137–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, James D., and McConnell, Jason B.. 2003. “The Effect of Negative Campaign Advertising on Vote Choice: The Mediating Influence of Gender.” Social Science Quarterly 84 (4): 843–857.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krupnikov, Yanna. 2014. “How Negativity Can Increase and Decrease Voter Turnout: The Effect of Timing.” Political Communication 31 (3): 446–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krupnikov, Yanna, and Bauer, Nichole M.. 2014. “The Relationship Between Campaign Negativity, Gender and Campaign Context.” Political Behavior 36 (1): 167–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacy, Stephen, and Riffe, Daniel. 1997. “Sampling Error and Selecting Intercoder Reliability Samples for Nominal Content Categories.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (4): 963–973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lau, Richard R., and Rovner, Ivy Brown. 2009. “Negative Campaigning.” Annual Review of Political Science 12: 285–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lau, Richard R., Sigelman, Lee, and Rovner, Ivy Brown. 2007. “The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment.” Journal of Politics 69 (4): 1176–1209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lightdale, Jenifer R., and Prentice, Deborah A.. 1994. “Rethinking Sex Differences in Aggression: Agressive Beavior in the Absence of Social Roles.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20 (1): 34–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipsitz, Keena, and Geer, John G.. 2017. “Rethinking the Concept of Negativity: An Empirical Approach.” Political Research Quarterly 70 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917706547.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipsman, Andrew, Mudd, Graham, Rich, Mike, and Bruich, Sean. 2012. “The Power of ‘Like’: How Brands Reach (and Influence) Fans Through Social-Media Marketing.” Journal of Advertising Research 52 (1): 40–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, Wendy, and Ruths, Derek. 2013. “What's in a Name? Using First Names as Features for Gender Inference in Twitter.” In AAAI Spring Symposium: Analyzing Microtext, 13:01.Google Scholar
Malloy, Liam C, and Pearson-Merkowitz, Shanna. 2016. “Going Positive: The Effects of Negative and Positive Advertising on Candidate Success and Voter Turnout.” Research & Politics 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015625078.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marder, Ben, Slade, Emma, Houghton, David, and Archer-Brown, Chris. 2016. “‘I Like Them, but Won't “Like” Them’: An Examination of Impression Management Associated with Visible Political Party Affiliation on Facebook.” Computers in Human Behavior 61 (August): 280–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matsa, Katerina Eva, and Shearer, Elisa. 2018. “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2018.” http://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/.Google Scholar
Mattes, Kyle, and Redlawsk, David P.. 2014. The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning. London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mehdizadeh, Soraya. 2010. “Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking 13 (4): 23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, William J. 2013. “We Can't All Be Obama: The Use of New Media in Modern Political Campaigns.” Journal of Political Marketing 12 (4): 326–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulac, Anthony. 2006. “The Gender-Linked Language Effect: Do Language Differences Really Make a Difference?” In Sex Differences and Similarities in Communication, eds. Canary, Daniel J., Dindia, Kathryn. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Newman, Matthew L., Groom, Carla J., Handelman, Lori D., and Pennebaker, James W.. 2008. “Gender Differences in Language Use: An Analysis of 14,000 Text Samples.” Discourse Processes 45 (3): 211–236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Park, Gregory, Yaden, David Bryce, Andrew Schwartz, H., Kern, Margaret L., Eichstaedt, Johannes C., Kosinski, Michael, et al. 2016. “Women Are Warmer but No Less Assertive than Men: Gender and Language on Facebook.” PLoS One 11 (5): e0155885.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pew Research Center. 2017. “Social Media Fact Sheet.” http://www.pewinternet.org/factsheet/social-media/.Google Scholar
Rosenthal, Robert, and Rubin, Donald B.. 1979. “Comparing Significance Levels of Independent Studies.” Psychological Bulletin 86 (5): 1165–1168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sap, Maarten, Park, Gregory, Eichstaedt, Johannes, Kern, Margaret, Stillwell, David, Kosinski, Michal, et al. 2014. “Developing Age and Gender Predictive Lexica over Social Media.” In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 1146–1151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schienle, Anne, SchÌfer, Axel, Stark, Rudolf, Walter, Bertram, and Vaitl, Dieter. 2005. “Gender Differences in the Processing of Disgust—and Fear—Inducing Pictures: An FMRI Study.” NeuroReport 16 (3): 4.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwartz, H. Andrew, Eichstaedt, Johannes C., Kern, Margaret L., Dziurzynski, Lukasz, Ramones, Stephanie M., Agrawal, Megha, et al. 2013. “Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach.” PLoS One 8 (9): e73791.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stryker, Robin, Taylor Danielson, J., and Conway, Bethany Anne. 2015. “Who Is More Tolerant of Political Incivility?” In Proceedings of the 111 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. San Francisco, California.Google Scholar
Trent, Judith S., and Sabourin, Teresa. 1993. “Sex Still Counts: Women's Use of Televised Advertising during the Decade of the 80's.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 21 (1): 21–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Kevin M., Gainous, Jason, and Holman, Mirya R.. 2017. “I Am Woman, Hear Me Tweet! Gender Differences in Twitter Use among Congressional Candidates.” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 38 (4): 430–455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walter, Annemarie S., and Vliegenthart, Rens. 2010. “Negative Campaigning across Different Communication Channels: Different Ball Games?” International Journal of Press/Politics 15 (4): 441–461.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wattal, Sunil, Schuff, David, Mandviwalla, Munir, and Williams, Christine B.. 2010. “Web 2.0 and Politics: The 2008 US Presidential Election and an e-Politics Research Agenda.” MIS Quarterly 34 (4): 669–688.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wattenberg, Martin P., and Brians, Craig Leonard. 1999. “Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer or Mobilizer?” American Political Science Review 93 (4): 891–899.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, Andrew J. 2011. “A Meta-Analytical Review of Selective Exposure to and the Enjoyment of Media Violence.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 55 (2): 232–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Christopher. 2012. “Emotions, Campaigns, and Political Participation.” Political Research Quarterly 66 (2): 414–428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Christopher, Dunaway, Johanna, and Johnson, Tyler. 2012. “It's All in the Name: Source Cue Ambiguity and the Persuasive Appeal of Campaign Ads.” Political Behavior 34:561–584.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WWBP. 2014. “WWBP Age and Gender Lexica.” http://wwbp.org/lexica.html.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Phillips supplementary material

Phillips supplementary material

Download Phillips supplementary material(File)
File 1.5 MB