Jarman, Annie. 2026. “Clicks and Stones: Women Politicians and Gendered Hostility Online.” British Journal of Political Science 56: e29. doi:10.1017/S0007123426101458.
Award: Sophonisba Breckinridge Award for Best Paper on Women and Politics (MPSA, 2024)
Women politicians report that social media abuse harms their personal and professional lives. However, prior text-based research finds that men receive more general online hostility than women—except among the most visible politicians. I hypothesize that backlash to perceived gender role violations - such as public visibility - will include distinctly gendered content, such as slurs and references to appearance. Using a novel and replicable method, I analyze hostile and gendered language in three million Twitter mentions of US state representatives. I find that hostility toward visible women differs from men in content, not volume. Visible women face similar volumes of generic hostility but twice as much gender-specific abuse as men. This pattern holds across two alternate measures of perceived conformity to traditional gender roles: legislator tone and the presence of women in the chamber. Incorporating gendered content into text-based analyses reconciles discrepancies between observational and self-reported data and validates women politicians' reports.
Jarman, Annie. “Toll of Trolls: The Impact of Online Hostility on Politician's Campaign Decisions.”
Awards: Honorable Mention for Cutting Edge Research on Women and Politics by Empirical Study of Gender Networks (EGEN, 2024); Dean's Award for Graduate Research Excellence (Washington University in St. Louis, 2025)
Does the distinct abuse women politicians receive online decrease their political ambition? By pairing a novel method of distinguishing gendered hostility from general hostility in tweets directed to politicians with hand-collected panel data on the career decisions of 1,247 U.S. state legislators across four election cycles, I shed new light on the conventional wisdom. Contrary to the widespread expectation that online hostility drives incumbent women from politics, I show that women’s political ambition is resilient to gendered hostility. Although women politicians receive more severe and gender-based online hostility than men, they are less likely than men to exit office in response. These findings suggest a gender-based selection effect, where only the most thick-skinned women pursue political office.
Jarman, Annie. “The Effect of Witnessing Online Hostility Toward Politicians on Nascent Ambition.”
Why has the increased number of women in politics not spurred greater political ambition among women in the polity? I argue that potential candidates are likely noticing not only the presence of women politicians, but also how those women experience public and gendered abuse. I test whether the expectation of abuse decreases ambition using surveys with embedded experiments. In line with my theory, I find that respondents are aware of the costs of online abuse toward politicians, and women participants are significantly more likely than men to perceive such abuse as problematic. Further, I uncover a strong negative correlation between expecting online abuse and political ambition. Attempts to counteract concerns using candidate training material are unsuccessful. However, women participants who strongly value women’s descriptive representation in office and have experienced prior discrimination are more likely to retain ambition despite awareness of abuse.
Englehart, Nathan, and Annie Jarman. “Social observation induces gender performance and can invert the effects of survey items.”
We identify interviewer-induced shifts in questions that are increasingly common in major probability surveys across the social sciences: masculinity and femininity self-evaluations. Using exogenous assignment to web and in-person samples in the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES), we show that interviewer presence shifts responses toward gender-congruent norms for both men and women, with markedly larger causal effects for men. We argue these asymmetric responses reflect gendered performance across genders and aligns with precarious manhood theory for men, which conceptualizes men’s status as tenuous and contestable under social evaluation. Cross-mode replications of two studies using these measures show that interviewer mode can either leave observed relationships unchanged or reverse the sign of significant coefficients. Our results demonstrate the power of gender in social interaction and carry implications for quantitative scholars using masculinity and femininity measures across the social sciences.
Jarman, Annie, Matthew Hayes, and Diana Z. O'Brien. “Is Encouragement Endogenous? Exploring the Effect of Random Campaign Encouragement on Political Ambition.”
Political encouragement is widely viewed as a tool for expanding the pool of political candidates, particularly among groups historically underrepresented in elected office. Citizens who report being encouraged to run for office express substantially higher levels of political ambition, leading many scholars and practitioners to view encouragement as a promising route into politics. A central challenge, however, is that existing evidence relies heavily on self-reported survey data. Individuals with greater preexisting ambition may be more likely to receive, perceive, remember, or report encouragement, making it difficult to determine whether encouragement increases ambition or merely reflects it. We address this concern using a two-wave nationally representative survey experiment. In Wave 1, respondents were randomly assigned to receive a brief encouragement message and we measure whether they sought additional information about running for office. Four months later, we assess whether respondents remember being encouraged. Encouragement increases information-seeking in the short term, but these effects are concentrated among respondents with higher baseline ambition and disappear over time. Moreover, respondents with greater pre-treatment ambition are more likely to recall encouragement and report encouragement from multiple sources. Rather than drawing new individuals into politics, encouragement may disproportionately benefit those who were already most inclined to seek office.