The role of gender in online campaigning: Swedish candidates’ motives and use of social media during the European election 2014

ABSTRACT

This study addresses politician’s motives and use of social media platforms for campaigning purposes from a gender perspective. The role of gender is tested using survey data on Swedish candidates and behavioral data from Twitter before, during, and after the 2014 European election. Our findings show gender-related patterns in how candidates assess the usefulness of social media as a campaign tool. Female candidates tend to value social media to a greater extent and evaluate social media use more positively than male candidates. We also find that the election campaign affects how male and female candidates interact with their followers.

KEYWORDS:

• Election campaign
• European election
• gender
• social media
• Twitter

Acknowledgments

We are in great debt to Hampus Brynolf who helped us collect all the Twitter data and made the study possible. In addition we would like to thank Jonathan Polk at the Political Science Department, University of Gothenburg, for invaluable comments and advice, as well as the seminar participants from the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, who gave helpful feedback on the paper draft.

Notes

^1. All the means in the article were calculated with the margins command in Stata 14.1, while holding other factors constant at their average values.

^2. In the party’s ethical guidelines from 2011, there are instructions for social media use that state that it is important to be honest and sincere, and treat people the same way on the Internet as in real life. Among other things, the guidelines state that candidates should: not use social media when in an upset state of mind, always think about the political consequences when publishing, avoid internal discussions (the guidelines say this is best handled within the party), and respect the law (pp. 5–6). These statements give a clue as to some of the trouble the party has had with their representatives on social media platforms.

^3. Because alpha was significantly different from zero, we preferred negative binomial regression over Poisson regression.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linn A. C Sandberg

Linn A.C. Sandberg is a PhD candidate at the department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. Sandberg is conducting research on how digitalization and the growth of social media affect representative democracy and the democratic values that are traditionally viewed as providing legitimacy to political decisions.

Patrik Öhberg

Patrik Öhberg is an associate professor in political science at the University of Gothenburg. Öhberg has a wide research interest in theories and practices of representative democracy. Specific interests include the perceptions and behaviors of political and administrative elites. Öhberg’s work is published in journals such as British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and West European Politics. His latest book “Ambitious Politicians. The Implications of Career Ambition in Representative Democracy” was published by Kansas University Press in 2017.