Unveiling Online Violence against Women in Politics: EU Political Candidates

• In Event: Group Representation and Experiences on Social Media

Abstract

Violence against women in politics is a pervasive phenomenon. While both women and men in politics are victims of violence, violence against women takes on different contours. Being the product of intrinsic gender relations, the political space is built upon a set of rules and norms that benefit men at the expense of women. As a result, women who run for office or occupy political positions are often victims of gender-based attacks that seek to shame, silence, and, ultimately, exclude them from the political space.

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of violence against women in politics in the online space, specifically on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter). This platform is commonly used by politicians but serves as a prominent stage for impulsive and malicious discourse. We analyze online discourse on X in the form of tweets, produced by common citizens and directed at female and male candidates for Prime Minister or Head of State, in order to answer the following research questions: What characterizes the online violence that both female and male candidates experience? How frequently do female candidates experience online violence against women? What factors (individual and political) might be associated with a higher or lower level of online violence against women in politics?

The paper draws on an original dataset of tweets. All legislative and presidential elections held within the last three years in European Union (EU) countries that had at least one woman among the four most voted candidates for Prime Minister or Head of State were selected. For presidential elections, only those conducted by direct vote were considered. The tweets sent to the four main candidates of the selected elections during the two weeks before Election Day were extracted. Candidates without an X account were excluded. In total, we were left with 49 candidates (17 women and 32 men) from twelve EU countries comprising more than 30000 tweets. We used the SentiOne tool for data extraction and performed a sentiment analysis (positive, neutral, and negative) and a classification of all tweets into six categories of gendered discourse (inspired by Atalanta, 2018; Esposito and Breeze, 2022; Krook, 2021), namely, body shaming; family/personal life; parenthood; attempts to silence the candidate; attempts to portray the candidate as incompetent; and moral degradation through gendered insults; along with objectification and sexualization of the candidate.

Authors

• Ana Espírito-Santo, Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal

• Bárbara Santos