Two candidates can make the same promise and still sound nothing alike. The study asks whether the emotional register of a campaign tracks the candidate's gender — and finds that it does.
Beyond what candidates promise lies how they say it — the emotive tone of their language. The study examines whether that tone differs systematically by gender, using measures of the emotional content of political speech on the campaign trail.
The pattern is consistent: women candidates use more positive language than men in their campaign communication. The gender gap in emotional tone is meaningful and systematic — not a quirk of a single race or candidate.
the study finds women campaign with more positive language than men; the direction is shown here — the measured size of the gap is reported in the paper
Emotional style isn't decoration — it shapes how voters read and evaluate candidates. A systematic gender difference in campaign sentiment means part of the way gender operates in elections runs through the affective texture of speech, not just its substance.
If men and women campaign in different emotional registers, then studying gender in elections means attending to style as well as substance — and asking how much of what we read as a candidate's “temperament” is really a strategic, and gendered, choice of tone.
Barnes, Tiffany D., Charles Crabtree, Akitaka Matsuo, and Yoshikuni Ono. “Women Use More Positive Language than Men: Candidates' Strategic Use of Emotive Language in Election Campaigns.” Journal of Politics, forthcoming.
read the paper →analysis of gender differences in candidates' emotive language · the scale illustrates the documented direction; the measured gap lives in the paper