Clicks and Stones: The High Stakes of Visibility for Women in Politics (R&R at British Journal of Political Science)
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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 conformity to traditional gender norms: 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.
The Toll of Trolls: Online Hostility and Women's Campaign Decisions
Honorable Mention for Cutting Edge Research on Women and Politics by Empirical Study of Gender Networks (EGEN, 2024)
Previous work emphasizes that closing the gender gap in elected office is contingent on increasing women’s static and progressive ambition. Thus, recent claims by politicians that gendered online abuse is prompting women’s attrition from political office are cause for alarm. In the first empirical study of this claim, I theorize that the added toll of gendered online hostility alters women’s cost-benefit analysis of campaigning for reelection or another office. I use dynamic panel data and natural language processing to model the effect of gendered and general online abuse on subsequent campaign decisions. I find that gender strongly mediates the relationship between exposure to hostility and the choice to campaign. The result showcases how gender biases contribute to women's underrepresentation by creating gendered costs of officeholding.