“You need to resign”: The Effects of Social Media Commentary and Gender on Incumbent Candidate Evaluations during Political Campaigns

As social media becomes a dominant tool in political campaigns, it is important to analyze how candidates and voters interact over social media and how this impacts elections. This study aims to uncover whether Instagram comments - a key tool voters use to interact with candidates - have an impact on voters’ perceptions and whether or not there are differences in these impacts based on the gender of the candidate. Due to bias against women in politics, I hypothesize that respondents will evaluate female candidates more harshly than male candidates after viewing negative Instagram comments associated with them. To test this hypothesis, I randomly separated a sample of 435 undergraduate students into four groups. Each group was assigned a hypothetical incumbent Senate candidate (male or female) and shown a candidate biography. The biographies were identical, save for the names/genders of the candidates. Additionally, the two experimental groups were shown negative Instagram comments associated with their candidate. Each group was asked to evaluate their candidate's viability, favorability, competency, leadership ability, and qualifications, in addition to scoring the likelihood that they would vote for them. I found that the male candidate had lower scores than his female counterpart for all six traits evaluated, meaning he was evaluated more harshly. This persisted in both the control and experimental groups, as well as both before and after the stimulus was presented to the experimental groups. However, the respondents’ evaluation scores for the female candidate dropped by a larger margin after viewing the negative comments than the scores for the male candidate did. This persisted for five of the six traits evaluated. Voters’ perceptions, then, are impacted by negative Instagram comments for male and female candidates, although there is some evidence to indicate that they have a larger negative effect on the perceptions of female candidates.