Gendered Self-Promotion: Differences in How Voters Evaluate Women and Men Who Highlight Their Legislative Accomplishments

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231209132
• Author: Nichole M. Bauer
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 344–358

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231209132

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Gendered Self-Promotion: Differences in

How Voters Evaluate Women and Men

Who Highlight Their Legislative

Accomplishments

Nichole M. Bauer

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

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that women can face a punishment from voters for engaging in self-promotion. Self-

promotion, highlighting your accomplishments, can be detrimental to women because such behavior violates feminine

stereotypic expectations that women be modest and humble. I argue and show that voters do not punish women for

engaging in self-promotion but there are different styles of self-promotion that are more benef‌icial to women than

others. I argue that women will be most successful when they use a communal style of self-promotion that emphasizes

feminine stereotypic qualities, such as compromise. Conversely, I argue that agentic forms of self-promotion, which draw

on masculine qualities, will be less successful for women because agency violates feminine expectations for wom en. I test

the effects of communal and agentic self-promotion using two experiments. The result shows two key f‌indings. First,

voters do not punish women incumbents for using agentic styles of self-promotion, but women receive more positive

evaluations with communal self-promotion. Second, voters are slightly more likely to reward men for communa l self-

promotion relative to women legislators.

Keywords

self-promotion, gender, stereotypes, credit-claiming, campaigns, political communication, voter decision-mak ing

The 2018 “Pink Wave”election saw record numbers of

women run for and win elected off‌ice at the local, state,

and federal levels. When these incumbent women stood

for re-election in 2020 and 2022 many of them lost. The

incumbent women losing re-election include Abby Fin-

kenauer in Iowa’sf‌irst congressional district lost in 2020,

and Elaine Luria of Virginia’s second congressional

district lost in 2022. When women incumbents run for re-

election they often face high-quality challengers who can

make it more diff‌icult for incumbent women to win re-

election (Branton et al. 2018;Milyo and Schlosberg

2000). Securing re-election often requires incumbents,

regardless of their gender, to engage in self-promotion, or

more simply put, to talk about all the work they did for

their districts and states. A burgeoning body of scholar-

ship indicates that women are highly effective legislators

(Anzia and Berry 2011;Volden, Wiseman, and Wittmer

2013) which means they have much to brag about to

voters. Scant research examines how legislator gender

affects voter responses to self-promotion. This manuscript

f‌ills this gap.

Self-promotion can be fraught for women

1

because

highlighting accomplishments is a stereotypically mas-

culine activity, meaning it goes against the feminine

stereotypic expectations that women should be humble

and modest (Vinkenburg et al. 2011;Prentice and

Carranza 2002). Women are thought to face penalties

for breaking with masculine norms (Smith and Huntoon

2014;Rudman 1998) but research offers mixed evidence

on this point (Brooks 2013;Bauer, Harman, and Russell

2022). A gendered self-promotion backlash means that

women incumbents might not be able to effectively en-

gage in the conventional behaviors thought to secure re-

election (Fenno 1978;Mayhew 1974). Indeed, recent

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Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Nichole M. Bauer, Department of Political Science & Manship School of

Mass Communication, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA

70802.

Email: nbauer4@lsu.edu