Campaign like a girl? Gender and communication on social networking sites in the Czech Parliamentary election

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the communication styles of male and female candidates on Facebook during the 2017 parliamentary election campaign in the Czech Republic. It tests the assumption that female candidates engage in a more personal and interactive style of communication than male candidates. The Czech Republic provides a hard test of this hypothesis given that the electoral system poses weak incentives for candidates to run personal campaigns and the political culture exhibits strong gender stereotypes. We analyze the use of personalized content, technological disclosure, and interactivity in 1637 Facebook posts created by 227 candidates. The findings are in line with previous research and show that female candidates did not significantly differ from male candidates in the way they communicated on social networking sites (SNSs). The study extends our understanding of how communication styles are used in a political context. It suggests that politics presents a specific context which motivates politicians to pursue communication styles that overturn traditional stereotypes.

KEYWORDS:

• Campaign
• gender
• communication styles
• personalization
• interactivity
• social networking sites

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments which contributed to the quality of this article. Special thanks go to Andrew Roberts and Martina Hrbková for reading the paper and helping us overcome the language barrier. Last but not least, we are thankful to our research assistants Barbora Ostřížková, Barbora Sobotková, and Oleg Berkovich.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data are available upon request from the corresponding author.

Notes

1 According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, the gender equality index in the Czech Republic in 2017 was nearly 13 points below the EU average. There was almost no progress in terms of gender equality across various social spheres between 2005 and 2015 (Gender Equality Index 2017, 2018).

2 Voters can cast up to four preferential votes. The change to a more flexible system in 2010 (the number of preferential votes increased from two to four, the percentage of preferential votes required to move upwards on the ballot decreased from 7% to 5%) has had no impact on the number of elected women (Kouba, Filipec, & Nálepová, 2013). Voters typically cast preferential votes to the top candidates. In 2013 only 14.5% of MPs were elected by preferential votes (Havlík et al., 2014).

3 In Eastern and Southern European countries in general, politicians are less likely to own Twitter accounts than their counterparts in Northern and Western Europe (Nulty, Theocharis, Popa, Parnet, & Benoit, 2016).

4 Women typically had lower positions on the party lists, therefore the first female candidates were often unsuccessful candidates.

5 We set the minimum of four posts in order to capture communication patterns across all candidates represented in the sample of selected Facebook posts, even those who reached a critically low number of posts in our original randomly selected sample of 1500 posts. The number was chosen to increase representation of those candidates in the sample of selected posts and at the same time keep manual coding manageable. The additional posts were selected randomly from the originally unselected posts by the underrepresented candidates. In other words, no additional candidates were added to the sample during our extension of the sample of Facebook posts.

6 We added this dimension based on a qualitative pilot study. We realize that several Czech politicians had been professional politicians for many years and this dimension could hardly be present in their communication.

7 Facebook offers a broad spectrum of symbols and pictures. We decided to focus on the most common ones that are easily associated with specific feelings – smileys, hearts, and thumbs up/down.

8 The binary variables were created because the use of technological disclosure was relatively rare.

9 We conducted several rounds of coder training and three reliability tests on a random sample of 10% of selected posts.

10 This method should balance the differences in activities of politicians and thus the different number of analyzed posts in the sample. We admit that there are certain limits for politicians with a small number of posts in the sample.

11 Examples of non/political and non/personalized content can be found in the supplementary materials.

12 Excluding the interaction term from the analysis does not change the results of the models.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [grant GA18-15700S]; Masaryk University [grant MUNI/A/1216/2017].

Notes on contributors

Lenka Hrbková

Lenka Hrbková is an assistant professor of political science and a researcher at the International Institute of Political Science at Masaryk University, Brno. Her work focuses on women in politics, political behavior, and political psychology.

Alena Macková

Alena Macková holds a PhD in political science and is a researcher at the Department of Media Studies and Journalism of Masaryk University, Brno. Her research interests are political communication, civic participation, activism and new media.