Abstract
This paper evaluates the extent to which women and men candidates are more likely to interact with peers who share their gender, political party, district, incumbency status, and their party’s governmental status. Using Twitter data collected during the 2019 election campaign in Finland, we observe an overall tendency towards homophily – defined as the tendency to engage mainly with similar others - across all studied characteristics. However, women and men candidates exhibit differences in the extent to which they retweet similar others, and the magnitude and direction of these gender differences vary across the studied characteristics. Logistic multivariate models reveal that compared with men, women are statistically more likely to retweet candidates from their own party, but less likely to retweet candidates with the same incumbency status, and marginally less likely to retweet candidates of the same gender. No significant gender differences are in the likelihood of retweeting peers who share the electoral district and the governmental status of a candidate’s party.
| Original language | English |
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| Journal | Parliamentary Affairs |
| Early online date | 23 Oct 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 23 Oct 2024 |
Acknowledgements
They would also like to thank Åsa von Schoultz, Aleksi Suuronen, and Veikko Isotalo for collecting information about the candidates and for their generosity in sharing the data. They would also like to thank participants at Weizenbaum’s research seminar for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.Funding
We did not receive any funding for our study. The authors are grateful for the financial support of the IntraComp Project (University of Helsinki) towards conducting the data collection.