Call Me Auntie: Do the Scopes of the Offices Determine Gendered Campaign Messages

with Yu Jeong Hwang. This study examines how political candidates’ gender affects their campaign messages depending on the scope and the level of elections.

This study examines how political candidates’ gender affects their campaign messages depending on the scope and the level of elections. Literature is mixed on whether female candidates are more likely to emphasize warmth as well as pledge the policies that were often understood to be female-friendly than are male candidates. We argue that the confusion is because the literature did not consider the effect of the scope of elections. We argue that women are more likely to utilize gendered electoral messages in lower levels of government; they are also more likely to use gendered messages in the legislature in comparison to those in executive offices. We substantiate our argument using a unique data set of individual manifestos, comprehensive official documents with candidates’ personal information, and their policy pledges mandatorily published by each candidate, from over fourteen thousand candidates running in eleven national and local level elections in South Korea from 2000 to 2020.