How Women Attack: Candidate Reliance on Feminine and Masculine Traits in Campaign Negativity

We develop a framework to identify how women use negative messages in political campaigns. We argue that women will be more likely to use contrast negativity, messages that include a negative message against an opponent and a positive message about the candidate sponsoring the ad, rather than attack negativity, messages that only criticize an opponent. We also identify how feminine and masculine traits emerge in negativity—a strategy we call gendered trait negativity. We analyze gendered trait negativity in television ads from the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP) for House, Senate, and gubernatorial races from 2010 to 2018. Using logistic regression models, we find that women use contrast messages more than attack messages when running against a man. Second, we find that women are more likely to highlight feminine traits over masculine traits in negative messages when their opponent is a man relative to when their opponent is a woman.