Insta(nt)famous? Visual self-presentation and the use of masculine and feminine issues by female politicians on Instagram

Abstract

This study examines how female politicians are using Instagram to present themselves to the electorate and how this affects audience engagement. A manual content analysis was conducted to explore how female politicians, compared to male politicians (N = 40), use Instagram in terms of visual self-presentation, the use of masculine and feminine issues, and how this may lead to increased engagement (i.e., likes and comments). In total, N = 762 posts were manually analyzed. The study shows that female politicians receive more likes when they are visible in a picture compared to male politicians. It also reveals that male and female politicians both refer more to feminine issues than to masculine issues, although the use of feminine issues resulted in less likes. We find that some issues lead to more discussion amongst Instagram users, and that this differs between male and female politicians. The study sheds light on how politicians use Instagram and offers insights into how (female) politicians can use the platform to their advantage.

Facial Prominence of Political Candidates: Gender Differences in Private and Public Pages on Facebook Profile

“…Facebook represents a unique social network in this regard in that it allows to convey information through two different types of profile: One is strictly personal whereas the other is public and can reasonably reflect the interaction between the politician and the staff members in order to effectively shape the political campaign. As for the public profiles, results from both studies indicated that there was no effect of gender on facial prominence, confirming the findings obtained by Jungblut and Haim (2021) in relation to European Elections (see also Brands et al, 2021 ). Hence, there was no evidence of any gender-based discrepancy in the way male and female politicians visually present themselves.…”

“…Although several studies have been dealing with the face-ism effect in social media, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study has analyzed politicians’ social media profiles as a function of whether the profile is personal in nature, or it is related to the public activity of the person as a politician. Overall, in line with Brands et al (2021) and Jungblut and Haim (2021) , we expected to observe no higher facial dominance of male as compared to female candidates. More specifically, although we had no a priori hypotheses, we also explored whether face-ism in the more informal private profiles.…”

“…In line with this hypothesis, Jungblut and Haim (2021) have recently analyzed the Twitter and Instagram accounts of candidates running in the 2019 European Election showing no significant difference between male and female candidates in terms of facial dominance (i.e., whether the face occupied at least one third of the picture). Similarly, Brands et al (2021) found that the pictures of Dutch and American politicians posted in Instagram did not differ as a function of gender in relation to camera perspective (i.e., close-ups vs. full body shots).…”

“…With few exceptions (e.g., Brands et al, 2021 ; Jungblut and Haim, 2021 ), previous research about face-ism has mainly considered the facial prominence of male and female politicians in institutional websites (e.g., official government websites). In the present work, we will further investigate how politicians are portrayed in a popular social network, namely Facebook.…”

Visual Politics: Visual Political Communication on Social Media

“…A comparison of self-and media-presentation of female and male candidates during the 2019 European Election on social media and in the news showed that "female candidates are actually portrayed more often happy on SNS [social networking sites] than in the news, which echoes the interpretation of a visual communication strategy that is in line with the strategic stereotype theory" (Haim and Jungblut, 2020, p. 15). Examination of visual self-presentation of Dutch and American politicians on Instagram led to a result that visual depiction did not differ by gender, except in the case of clothing: female politicians appeared more often in casual clothing (Brands et al, 2021). In a study by Carlson and Håkansson (2022), visual party communication on Facebook in the 2019 EU election campaigns' national level showed that the depiction of smiling faces and casual clothing was more frequent among female than male politicians.…”