The “gender affinity effect” behind female politicians' social media support: facebook civil talk during Israel's 2021 elections

Abstract

Purpose

The study aims to examine the validity of the gender affinity effect on social media throughout election campaigns.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper examines the role of gender in political discourse, using citizens' conversations on Facebook in the days leading up to Israel's 2021 elections as its case study. The analysis measured the engagement generated by male and female politicians in citizens' publicly open Facebook discussions (N = 1875) using a trend-tracking software. The analysis uses t-tests to examine differences in engagement between conversations about male versus female politicians and between posts written by male versus female authors. In addition, a two-way ANOVA analysis was conducted in an attempt to understand the shared impact of both the politicians' gender and posts authors' gender on the posts' engagement.

Findings

The study reveals that although more posts discuss male politicians, posts dealing with female politicians expressed significantly more support towards those politicians. The analysis also highlights that women tend to write more supportive posts and that most of their posts deal with female politicians. Furthermore, interaction effect analysis revealed that women's posts about female politicians generate more engagement in terms of likes, comments and number of participants than posts written by women that deal with male politicians.

Practical implications

The findings should encourage women politicians to run their campaigns via social media.

Originality/value

The study presents the first social media analysis for gender affinity effect and highlights the importance of the effect in online political communication studies.

Peer review

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2022-0199

Citation

Samuel-Azran, T. and Yarchi, M. (2023), "The “gender affinity effect” behind female politicians' social media support: facebook civil talk during Israel's 2021 elections", Online Information Review, Vol. 47 No. 6, pp. 1168-1189. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2022-0199