The Cost of Debating Harassment Against Politicians: Are Women and Men Affected Equally?

Abstract Harassment of politicians is a growing global phenomenon, which threatens to erode the quality of democracy and descriptive representation. Past research has examined gender patterns of this violence and its effects on political ambition. We investigate the impact of political harassment on candidate appeal in Sweden, using a multimethod approach. First, a qualitative content analysis demonstrates that Swedish news stories where politicians comment on harassment against politicians often include weakness signals such as being fearful or worried. Second, we use an original conjoint experiment with 1,300 party selectors from six Swedish parties. This analysis shows that commenting on political violence in the media has an adverse effect on candidate appeal, likely because doing so activates politically undesirable images of victimhood. We also find that being associated with the issue is equally damaging to women’s and men’s political careers. Lastly, we conduct in-depth interviews with Swedish party selectors. These further illustrate that addressing this issue is perceived as deviating from the assertive model of a politician and that political violence is not regarded as a vote-winning issue. As a whole, our results demonstrate that publicly addressing the problem of violence against politicians can harm political careers and thus deter politicians from drawing policy attention to the issue.