Campaign like a girl? Gender and communication on social networking sites in the Czech Parliamentary election

This study focuses on the communication styles of male and female candidates on Facebook during the 2017 parliamentary election campaign in the Czech Republic. It tests the assumption that female candidates engage in a more personal and interactive style of communication than male candidates. The Czech Republic provides a hard test of this hypothesis given that the electoral system poses weak incentives for candidates to run personal campaigns and the political culture exhibits strong gender stereotypes. We analyze the use of personalized content, technological disclosure, and interactivity in 1637 Facebook posts created by 227 candidates. The findings are in line with previous research and show that female candidates did not significantly differ from male candidates in the way they communicated on social networking sites (SNSs). The study extends our understanding of how communication styles are used in a political context. It suggests that politics presents a specific context which motivates politicians to pursue communication styles that overturn traditional stereotypes.