11:20 - 13:00
PS7
Room:
Room: Meeting Room 2.2
Panel Session 7
Michal Gulczynski - Europe is a Woman. And What Does She Say about Men?
Ezgi Siir Kibris - The Role of Female Judges in the European Court of Human Rights
Anja Vojvodic - Divergent Paths to Power: Women Executives and the Case of Central and Eastern Europe
Cornelius Erfort - Targeting Gender on Facebook: Evidence from the 2019 European Parliament Elections
Targeting Gender on Facebook: Evidence from the 2019 European Parliament Elections
PS7-4
Presented by: Cornelius Erfort
Cornelius Erfort
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Are parties using gender-targeted appeals? Despite advancements in gender equality, the underrepresentation of women and the voting gap persist. New targeting capabilities allow parties to easily and precisely target ads, possibly increasing gender differences in voting. Yet, we know little about whether and how parties use gender-targeted appeals. Parties have an incentive to target and tailor ads by gender because appeals can affect the voting behavior of women and men differently. I further expect that the use of gender-targeted appeals depends on the partisan composition and demographic profile of the targeted groups. I test my argument using a new dataset of all Facebook ads from 136 parties matched with survey responses for the 2019 European Parliament elections across 28 countries. Identity-appeals on parties’ campaign ads are identified using computational vision. My findings have implications for our understanding of gender in party competition and the debate on online voter targeting.