Gender Differences in Negative Campaigning: The Impact of Party Environments

We explore whether men and women differ in their attack behavior and how party environments condition these differences. Whereas the literature on gender and negative campaigning is almost exclusively focused on the United States, we theorize that in European multiparty systems with strong and cohesive parties, the party environment has a significant impact on whether male and female politicians choose negative strategies and which targets they select for their attacks. Working from the prevalent gender stereotypes, we assume that women should be less likely to use negative messages, and men should be less likely to select female targets. Yet we also conjecture that these effects are smaller in parties with a more equal gender balance. We examine almost 8,000 press releases issued by 680 politicians during four national election campaigns in Austria to test these hypotheses. The results show that (1) men use negative strategies more often, (2) women and men differ in their choice of targets, and (3) the gender balance within parties moderates the gender gap in target selection. Research for this paper was conducted under the auspices of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), a National Research Network (NFN) funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (S10903-G11, S10903-G08).