Tweeting Through the Glass Ceiling: An Analysis of Female MEPs' Social Media Usage in the 2019 European Parliament Election Campaigns

Social media has been considered as the great equalizer for social inequalities such as gender and social class. Nonetheless, in particular gender inequalities seem to be quite persistent there: the usage of social media in political communication produces similar gender inequalities compared to pre-digital times. A systematic comparative approach for a larger set of (European) countries, however, is still lacking. We contribute to fill this research gap by studying how female politicians all over Europe use Twitter in the 2019 election campaigns to the European Parliament (EP). We formulate theoretical expectations based on the state of the art as well as qualitative interviews and explore quantitatively the Twitter usage of female party actors compared to their male counterparts to explain the differences. We rely on the novel ‘Twitter in the 2019 EP election campaigns dataset’ in combination with party- as well as country-level contextual data to investigate the impact of the social and political environment on female MEPs Twitter behavior. Our findings show that female candidates are less present on Twitter than their male counterparts but both are equally active during the campaign. While we include party and country characteristics to analyze future MEPs’ behavior on Twitter, we find that contextual factors cannot explain why male candidates are more likely to have an active Twitter account. Regarding their activity we find that gender is not relevant in explaining differences in how often they post on Twitter but this is mostly associated with the available resources to run an election campaign. These findings enhance our understanding of the hurdles of gender equality in European politics.