Social media has become an important part of election campaigns with negative social media updates mirroring more traditional advertising attacking candidates. In new research, Heather K. Evans and Jennifer Hayes Clark look at the effects of negative tweets made by female candidates on voters’ assessments of their leadership. They find that, when they go negative, female candidates suffer a significant penalty in how women voters view their leadership. By contrast, there is no such penalty for men who tweet negatively about their opponents.

It is less a week before Election Day in the United States, and attack advertising is on the rise. As The Hill and others reported last week, Vice President’s Kamala Harris’ campaign has at the later stage of their campaign embraced more negative advertising. Political science research on negativity shows that these sorts of tactics can both motivate people to turn out and can also make voters second-guess their choices in elections and stay home, especially when well-timed. For candidates who choose to go negative, there is the possibility though that it could backfire and hurt their chances of winning.

Does how women candidates communicate matter in elections?

In our previous published work, we found that women candidates are more likely to use “attack-style” tweets against their opponents compared to their male counterparts. Our research challenges traditional communication research which tends to show that at least in terms of television advertising, women and men campaign similarly. While women and men may campaign very differently on social media, the question is whether this matters in terms of how voters perceive these candidates and ultimately whether it affects election outcomes.

This fall, we have been conducting research for a book project specifically about sex differences in campaign communication. As part of our book, we designed a survey experiment to examine how voters perceive negative tweets by male versus female candidates. Participants were placed into one of four groups where they viewed tweets from a hypothetical congressional candidate (Figure 1): either a woman or a man (Ann Johnson or Tom Smith) who tweeted either all positive statements about their campaigns, or those same positive statements as well as a couple negative tweets about their opponent. We did not identify either candidate as a member of a particular party or include any photos of the candidate. We then asked participants to rate the hypothetical candidates on a range of character traits.

Figure 1 – Sample tweet from hypothetical congressional candidate

Penalties for going negative for women candidates

When we compare ratings between groups, we find that female candidates suffer a significant penalty in how voters view their leadership when they go negative. We find no impact however when the male candidate sends attack-style tweets. Furthermore, when examining how men and women responded to the campaign tweets, we find that the penalty female candidates receive for “going negative” comes entirely from female participants in the study. This means that when a woman goes negative, other women rate her significantly lower on leadership, and when a man goes negative, his ratings for leadership do not move.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Our research shows that candidates’ online campaign messages matter, especially for women. During this election, women voters have received significant attention, with some analysts reporting that this may be the biggest gender gap ever recorded. Given our research showing that women are more likely to harshly judge female, but not male, candidates for attack-style campaigning, this should be an important consideration as the campaigns, and especially the Harris campaign, design their communication strategies. Obviously, those in the campaign hope that their strategy as we move towards Election Day is a winning one.

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