Does Office Type Determine Gendered Campaign Messages?

This study examines how candidates’ gender shapes campaign messaging across different branches and levels of political office. Prior research offers mixed evidence on whether women are more likely than men to emphasize communal traits and women-related policies, often because gender effects are examined without fully accounting for institutional context. We address this inconsistency by foregrounding the role of electoral institutions. Building on strategic stereotype theory, we argue that gendered campaign messaging is a strategic response to office-specific incentives and expectations. In particular, we expect gendered appeals to be more prevalent at lower levels of government than at higher levels, and more pronounced in legislative than in executive races. We test these expectations using an original dataset of 46,966 official campaign booklets issued by all candidates competing for district-based executive and legislative offices in seventeen national and local elections in South Korea from 2000 to 2022. These booklets are legally standardized, page-limited documents distributed to voters and provide a rare opportunity to compare campaign messages across offices while holding the communication medium constant. We measure gendered messaging through candidates’ use of relational language and women-related policy terms. The results show that female candidates emphasize relational identities and women’s policy concerns more than male candidates. Crucially, the magnitude of this gender gap varies across institutional contexts. Gender differences are larger in legislative contests than in executive races and increase as elections move from national to subnational levels.