Marketing Female Candidates as “Women”: Gender and Partisanship’s Influence on Issue Discussion on Twitter in 2020

Abstract

Previous work in the area of gender and social media has shown that women campaign and market themselves online very differently than men. While female candidates are more likely to discuss certain types of issues (like education and healthcare) in their campaigns, some research has shown that as more women are added to a congressional race, less attention is paid to those “women’s issues.” Given the steady increase in the number of women running for office and the increasing saliency of “women’s issues” in American politics, this study examines the ways that female candidates marketed themselves differently than their male competitors in the 2020 U.S. House races on Twitter, paying particular attention to the influence of partisanship. The results show that women stressed different policy priorities in their tweets in 2020 compared to male candidates. While partisanship affects what issues get highlighted by candidates on Twitter, gender plays a role in whether candidates discuss issues that directly affect women as a group. Controlling for the context of the race, these findings demonstrate that when more women are added to a race, the likelihood of discussing “women’s issues” increases.