Women politicians are more engaging: male versus female politicians’ ability to generate users’ engagement on social media during an election campaign

ABSTRACT

In light of past studies’ findings that male politicians usually receive more salient coverage in the traditional media, this study examines whether social media provide a more equal opportunity platform for female politicians to generate users’ engagement and mobilize their supporters. Our study focuses on male versus female politicians’ ability to engage social media users during an election campaign, using the Israeli 2015 campaign as our case study. Female politicians’ posts generated significantly more user engagement in terms of the number of Likes and Shares in comparison to male politicians, while generating the same number of participants in their discussions. The results remained significant in a multilevel analysis, while controlling for other factors such as the politician’s age, party, ranking, and number of posts published by the politician. In terms of the posts’ content, an examination of their rhetoric did not reveal gender differences in their usage of authoritative voice, facts, and the use of emotions in their messages; however, analysis of the topics did suggest differences in the issues raised by male versus female politicians. The evidence strongly indicates that social media provides greater opportunities for female politicians to promote themselves and improve their status in the political power play.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• social media
• election campaigns
• Israel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Moran Yarchi Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications, and the Co-Head of the Public Diplomacy program, at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. Her main area of research is political communication, especially the media's coverage of conflicts and public diplomacy [email: [email protected]].

Tal Samuel-Azran (PhD, University of Melbourne; MA, New York University) is the Head of the international program at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications. His main fields of research are political communication, new media, public diplomacy and media globalization [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Moran Yarchi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8044-2145

Notes

1 It is important to note that Twitter is not a popular social network in Israel, with Twitter active users forming a mere 0.5% of Facebook users in Israel (Mor, 2016).

2 In the 1999 and 2001 election campaigns, the electoral system was changed to a ‘direct election of the prime minister’ system. Citizens were given two ballots and asked to vote for a particular candidate for prime minister, and a political party for the Knesset. In the 2003 elections, Israel returned to the original system.

3 The only female politician who did not get a matching male politician in our study was Shelly Yachimovich – ranked third in the Zionist Camp, since the politicians ranked second and fourth on the party’s list were also female.

4 A recent study examining the normalization hypothesis on social media during the Israeli 2015 election campaign had found that Prime Minister Netanyahu had a significant advantage in his social media campaign (Lev-On & Haleva-Amir, 2018).

5 A total of 196 posts were published by the 14 female politicians examined, and 305 by the 19 male politicians sampled in our study.

6 Yaakov Litzman (the head of Yahadut Hatora ‒ an ultra-orthodox party) and Abd Al Hakeem Haj Yahya (from the Joined List party) are two of the only few Knesset members who does not have a Facebook account. For Litzman, a possible explanation for not using social media could be the fact that his voters and supporters are less likely to use those platforms, due to religious reasons. Rachel Azaria (a new Knesset member for Kulanu) had opened a Facebook page after she was elected to serve as a Knesset member.

7 We also controlled for this factor in our politician sampling.

8 For this part of the analysis, we used all available posts from our original sample.

9 Posts using terms associated with emotions (such as fear, joy, anger) as well as writing which reflects emotional attitudes (such as hostility, aggression, optimism) were coded as using pathos.

10 A post could contain more than one rhetoric strategy.

11

12

13