Abstract
Previous research shows women candidates face double-standard with regard to fitness for office: women ought to be kind but leaders ought to be aggressive and agentic. At the same time, there is traditional division of what constitutes “women’s” issues (e.g. health-care) vs “male” (e.g. economy). Do these norms about what women politicians ought to be and talk about hurt or help them during elections? We investigate the case of U.S. 2018 mid-term elections on Twitter. Our findings suggest that engaging with “women’s” issues by female candidates as well as tweeting angrily is associated with higher likelihood of being elected. However, women candidates who use angry speech on Twitter, are more likely to also receive tweets with abusive language, in particular by other women. Thus, we show that social media could help female candidates to break stereotypes, and present themselves as nuanced candidates who can both stand for women’s issues but also be aggressive and leader-like.
•We analyzed all tweets by candidates for national office in the 2018 Midterms.•Candidate gender predicted how much they spoke about traditionally gendered topics.•Candidate gender was not predictive of level of anger in their tweets.•Women were more likely to win when tweeting more on female topics or expressing anger.•Women receive more hate tweets, especially when they break with gender stereotypes.
