Women on the Political Battleground: Does Gender Condition the Use of Negative Campaigning?

Abstract

This comparative study examines to what extent and under which conditions gender influences the use of negative campaigning in Western Europe. It advances existing research as this study is one of the few empirical examinations of party leaders’ use of negative campaigning in election campaigns and the conditioning effect of gender outside the US context. The analysis covers the British, Dutch and German parliamentary election campaigns between 1980-2006. These three Western European democracies represent least likely cases to test the relationship between a party leader’s gender and the extent and content of negative campaigning for two reasons. First of all, we expect lower levels of negative campaigning in these multiparty systems compared to the US two party context. Second, we expect smaller candidate effects in these parliamentary systems compared to the US presidential system. The findings highlight that gender indeed affects negative campaigning in Western Europe. This being said, female party leaders do not differ from their male counterparts in the degree to which they utilize negative messages, but the content of these messages does vary on the basis of gender. When female party leaders go negative, they are more likely to attack their opponents on the basis of their existing policy records or future policy proposals than male party leaders. Overall, this study allows for an advancement of theoretical and empirical work on the relationship between gender and negative campaigning which originated in the US context.