Understanding the Gendered Costs of Personalisation by Studying Campaigns from the Ground Up

Abstract

Women continue to be underrepresented among elected officials, despite evidence that they achieve comparable electoral success to men once they run for office (see for Ashworth et al. 2024). At the same time, gendered stereotypes and sexist attitudes toward women in politics remain widespread, yet these biases do not appear to systematically disadvantage women candidates at the ballot box. In order to address these findings that are seemingly at odds, we argue that we need to focus on campaigns from the ground up to assess how women candidates experience the day to day of campaigns and barriers they face as candidates such as sexism from voters and party activists and biased media coverage or negative. In this panel, we propose a set of papers that address this representational puzzle by examining the everyday electoral campaigns of women candidates. Overall, the papers speak to how personalisation and anti-gender mobilisations shape how voters view and interact with political candidates and the ways in which the media capture and portray political candidates. These developments have reshaped the impact of gender in contemporary campaigns. They have implications for the effectiveness of campaigns, campaign strategy, the additional emotional work involved and whether women are perceived as viable or “good” candidates. Building on the work of Thomas (2016), we aim to understand the gendered nature of personalism in political campaigns. The collection of papers are part of a five-year ERC-funded project (TWICEASGOOD) that examines women’s pathways to political power, using mixed-methods, across four countries (Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, and the UK). Each paper addresses the following: First, how does personalism in politics — a focus on individual traits such as motherhood — shape the experiences of women candidates? Second, how are the strategic use of these personalised identities of candidates shaped by the electoral and cultural context? In contexts where gender is highly politicised and divisive, often mobilised by right-wing or populist actors as part of broader culture wars, do women face additional barriers as candidates? A fifth paper takes a comparative approach to understand how media coverage responds to campaign effort. Methodologically, the first four papers draw on campaign ethnographies -- a powerful tool for capturing the day-to-day experiences of campaigning from “the ground up”. While there are long histories of ethnography of everyday politics, political elites have seldom themselves been the subjects of ethnographic attention, save for a handful of studies (e.g. recent work by Crewe 2018 and Miller, 2021). Meanwhile, much of this work has taken place inside parliament and political institutions and there is hitherto little ethnographic research that is focused on election campaigns, the experiences of parliamentary candidates and their campaign terms, and their interactions with voters. In total, the papers represent the shadowing of almost 40 women candidates in national elections from 4 countries and from political parties across the ideological spectrum totalling over 200 researcher days of participant observation. The fifth paper presents results from a comparative media analysis of these campaigns.

Title	Details
Twice as Available: Motherhood and the Gendered Costs in Electoral Campaigns	View Paper Details
Local Identity as Liability: Gendered Constructions of Experience in UK Election Campaigns	View Paper Details
A ‘Pit-Bull in Heels’: Gendered Personalisation and Women’s Experiences of Sexism in the 2023 Dutch Elections	View Paper Details
The Costs of Personalisation: Sexism and Misogyny in Women’s Campaign Experiences in Turkey	View Paper Details
Gendered Mediation in Personalised Campaigns: Media Bias Across Four Countries	View Paper Details