The Rassemblement National on social media: the online rewards of gendered political speech for radical right politicians

ABSTRACT

Social media has provided powerful tools for parties looking to grow their followings and spread their messages, and the radical right has made good use of these tools as they reach out to voters concerned with immigration. Women politicians’ online experiences remain highly gendered, raising questions about the potential for social media to facilitate their substantive representation. Using the Rassemblement National as a case study, I take up the question of how patterns of gender inequality on the radical right are perpetuated on social media and in interactions with online audiences. I analyse data scraped from the X (formerly called Twitter) accounts of RN politicians with negative binomial regression analyses and a theoretically informed computational analysis. I find that, while gender is not a significant predictor of online engagement, online audiences are particularly responsive to women when they comply with stereotypical gender performances. I argue that despite the promise of social media to open new opportunities of self-presentation and interaction for marginalized politicians, women on the radical right continue to be held to strict gendered stereotypes on social media and are rewarded when they comply with these same stereotypes.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• gender
• xenophobia
• Europe
• radical right

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Borealis at https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/LWHEPP.

Notes

1. Now known as X, this social media platform was called Twitter at the time of data collection.

2. For this analysis, I used the camembert-base French language model, available here: https://huggingface.co/BaptisteDoyen/camembert-base-xnli

3. In English, these labels translate as (in order): secularism, Islam, immigration, economic system, social welfare, violence, safety, European Union, sex, family, national identity, culture, electoral campaign, and health.

4. I also ran chi-squared post-estimation tests of equality on those means, and any significant results are reported in the findings.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.