From left to right: Alessandro Nai, Chiara Valli, Jürgen Maier and Loes Aaldering

Award won:

Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year in the field of political communication (2025)

Name(s) & affiliation:

Gendered Backlash Depends on the Context: Reassessing Negative Campaigning Sanctions Against Female Candidates via Large-Scale Comparative Data

Nai, A., Valli, C., Maier, J., & Aaldering, L. (2025). Gendered Backlash Depends on the Context. Reassessing Negative Campaigning Sanctions Against Female Candidates via Large-Scale Comparative Data. Political Communication, 42(3), 454-475.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2024.2434930

This piece was the result of intense collaboration, and friendship, that we have developed over the years. One way or another the four of us have all worked on attack politics, both using experiments and via large-scale data to disentangle “universal” from context-related dynamics. But we have also been a bit frustrated about some results in the literature (including in some of our previous research) regarding the role of gender in attack politics – specifically, the lack of results where, on paper, there should have been plenty. And decided to dive into it.

The starting point is rather straightforward: everything we know about the dynamics of gender in politics, and the structuring role of gender stereotypes against women in politics, specifically, suggests that women should be more punished than men when they go negative on their rivals. Yet, the literature only shows little and scattered evidence that this is the case. How could this be? Our intuition is that perhaps we have not been looking at the right place. If gender stereotypes matter, then their effect should be higher in contexts (i.e., countries) where cultural norms are more unfavourable towards women – contexts, in other words, where gender equality is less pronounced. We leveraged a large dataset that covers more than 700 candidates having competed in elections across almost 100 countries worldwide, and that is exactly what we found: the penalty against women for going negative is much more severe in countries with low gender equality.

While intrinsically this is a project about the role of gender (stereotypes) in politics, what we focus on is the ways in which “going negative” – that is, attacking political opponents during election campaigns – backlashes for those who engage in it.

We have long considered adding an experimental component to it, to show mechanisms (e.g., the intervening role of stereotypes). We even had in our hands some data in this sense, that we had collected for a different project. But we never really managed to make the large-scale observational and the experimental components “click” together. One reason, of course, is that our main claim is comparative – that women face a higher backlash in less egalitarian contexts. So a one-shot experiment (in our case, we had access to data from the USA) was not really ideal. We decided to drop the experiment, and only focused on the large-scale observational data. Abd that worked quite well.

Replications! Our data is quite awesome (I am not really objective, here, even if it is), but no data is perfect. In our case, one of its limitations, that we discuss at nauseam but that remains a concern, is that the data comes from expert judgments. On the plus side, this allows to have a really large-scale dataset, that adopts a holistic understanding of the election campaign (vs., e.g., “only” looking at what candidates say on social media). On the downside, experts can be biased. So, our results need to be replicated with other data. Really, get in touch with us if you have such data. On top of this, we still itch to show that the effects resit a controlled environment and are “causal” (yes, I know, I know). We really want to do an experiment that allows us to test for this differential effect of the context. So perhaps a large-scale comparative experiment? That would be great but is not cheap. Reach out if you could envision a collaborative study in this sense.

We all work on slightly different things, while coming together often to do some joint work (on negativity, notably). But here are some cool stuff that we have been busy with on our separate side recently

Alex has been working on the roots of political violence, looking for instance at the role of violent episodes via natural experiments. See for instance: Nai, A., van Erkel, P. F., & Bos, L. (2025). Violence Against Politicians Drives Support for Political Violence Among (Some) Voters: Evidence from a Natural Experiment. Public Opinion Quarterly, nfaf010. https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/89/2/310/8117288

Chiara has been working on the role of mainstream media in contributing to the spread of conspiracy theories among the public, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic. See Adam , S., Rohrbach, T., Keller, F., Makhortykh, M., de L√©on, E., Valli, C., Baghumyan, A., Sydorova (2025). How do media contribute to the dissemination of conspiracy beliefs? A field study combining panel and web tracking at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf033

Jürgen has recently been working on the mechanisms that can lead to the use of negative campaigning. See for instance: Maier, J., Oschatz, C., Stier, S., Dian, M., & Sältzer, M. (2025). Beyond rationality. Toward a more comprehensive understanding of the use of negative campaigning. European Political Science Review, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773925000025

Loes is currently working on a project on sexist campaign attacks (and how women candidates can respond to that – together with Alex!), various projects related to gendered political socialization, and has a continuing interest in gendered political stereotypes, see for instance: Van Der Pas, D., Aaldering, L., & Bos, A. L. (2024). Looks like a leader: Measuring evolution in gendered politician stereotypes. Political Behavior, 46(3), 1653-1675. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-023-09888-5

Awardee Interview: Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year in the field of political communication (2025)