{"title":"The “gender affinity effect” behind female politicians' social media support: facebook civil talk during Israel's 2021 elections","authors":"Tal Samuel-Azran, Moran Yarchi","doi":"10.1108/oir-04-2022-0199","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"PurposeThe study aims to examine the validity of the gender affinity effect on social media throughout election campaigns.Design/methodology/approachThis 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.FindingsThe 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 implicationsThe findings should encourage women politicians to run their campaigns via social media.Originality/valueThe study presents the first social media analysis for gender affinity effect and highlights the importance of the effect in online political communication studies.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2022-0199","PeriodicalId":54683,"journal":{"name":"Online Information Review","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Online Information Review","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1108/oir-04-2022-0199","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
PurposeThe study aims to examine the validity of the gender affinity effect on social media throughout election campaigns.Design/methodology/approachThis 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.FindingsThe 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 implicationsThe findings should encourage women politicians to run their campaigns via social media.Originality/valueThe study presents the first social media analysis for gender affinity effect and highlights the importance of the effect in online political communication studies.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2022-0199
期刊介绍:
The journal provides a multi-disciplinary forum for scholars from a range of fields, including information studies/iSchools, data studies, internet studies, media and communication studies and information systems.
Publishes research on the social, political and ethical aspects of emergent digital information practices and platforms, and welcomes submissions that draw upon critical and socio-technical perspectives in order to address these developments.
Welcomes empirical, conceptual and methodological contributions on any topics relevant to the broad field of digital information and communication, however we are particularly interested in receiving submissions that address emerging issues around the below topics.
Coverage includes (but is not limited to):
•Online communities, social networking and social media, including online political communication; crowdsourcing; positive computing and wellbeing.
•The social drivers and implications of emerging data practices, including open data; big data; data journeys and flows; and research data management.
•Digital transformations including organisations’ use of information technologies (e.g. Internet of Things and digitisation of user experience) to improve economic and social welfare, health and wellbeing, and protect the environment.
•Developments in digital scholarship and the production and use of scholarly content.
•Online and digital research methods, including their ethical aspects.