Year of the (Angry) Woman? Gendered Emotional Appeals on Twitter

• In Event: Understanding Emotions

Abstract

Persistent gender stereotypes portray women as pleasant and polite, but in the wake of the #MeToo movement and polarized politics, female candidates are turning to Twitter and they aren’t hiding their frustration. Congressional candidates use Twitter to connect with voters, but political stalemates over health care, reproductive rights, and pay equity are the fodder for female candidates’ emotionally charged rhetoric on Twitter. Women are running for office and winning at rates comparable to men, but female candidates are relying on emotional appeals in distinct ways from their male counterparts. We use a dataset of tweets by candidates for the U.S. House from 2016-2020 to determine sex-based differences in the emotional appeals candidates make on Twitter. We find that women running for office adopt a unique style of emotional appeals on Twitter, as women defy stereotypes by incorporating more angry rhetoric in their tweets. These findings extend what we know about the gendered nature of candidates’ emotional appeals and explain patterns of angry rhetoric that MCs use to engage voters in the lead up to elections.

Authors

• Annelise Russell, University of Kentucky

• Bryan Gervais, University of Texas at San Antonio

• Heather Evans, University of Virginia College of Wise