Gender in Facebook during the Local Electoral Campaign for Bucharest City Hall in 2020. The self-construction of the candidates

Abstract

Abstract: Romanian politicians have been using Facebook profiles as a digital tool. This study aims to analyze the gender dimension in the local electoral campaign for Bucharest City Hall in 2020 and to establish how the candidates portray themselves on their Facebook pages by going against hegemonic views. One of the focuses of the study in on gender and social media personalization and the second one is on building a personal political brand during the electoral campaign through gender identification. The hypothesis is that new media, (interactive, social, multimodal, user-centered, and circularly networked) play key role in this new communicative paradigm and they may become an important discursive space for redefining gender stereotypes and reproducing (new) social identities. The analysis focuses on the media and digital tools and on to what extent gender influences the self-personalization in digital campaigning. According to the analysis, the woman candidate engages in a particularly gendered form of personalizing by presenting herself through social media in caregiving roles. At the same time, the two candidates (both female and male) for Bucharest City Hall, used a mixed strategy of gender adaptiveness. On the one hand, the candidates use and present gender stereotypes in their self-presentation, in order to benefit from existing voter expectations and norms. On the other hand, they use a bending or overturning stereotype strategy as an alternative one. Keywords: election campaign; female politicians; male politicians; multimodality; social media; new communicative paradigm; gender stereotypes; digital identity, SC-CDS, personalization.