Personalization, Gender, and Social Media: Gubernatorial Candidates’ Social Media Strategies

• In Event: Gender, Media, and Politics

Abstract

This study focuses on the personalization of campaign politics, marked by candidates highlighting personal narratives over policy. The rise of social media may be accelerating this shift. Applying Strategic Stereotype Theory (Fridkin & Kenney, 2014), women politicians are challenged to deactivate stereotypes that associate men with agentic leadership traits while at the same time capitalizing on stereotypes that associate them with warmth. Taking this into consideration, we assess what role gender plays in candidate self-personalization on social media. A large-scale computerized content analysis of social media posts by 2014 gubernatorial candidates suggests that male candidates may see more strategic benefits in personalizing, but this effect does not persist in the face of electoral context variables like competitiveness. Overall, we find a wide variance in the extent to and the ways in which candidates personalize through social media. We begin work on explicating a typology of self-personalizing.

Authors

• Shannon C McGregor, University of Texas at Austin

• Regina G. Lawrence, U of Texas - Austin

• Arielle Cardona, U of Texas - Austin