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Gendered language is seemingly found everywhere in American politics. We test the impact that gendered language has on voter support for a candidate, using a validated dictionary of words rated as highly masculine or feminine. In three experimental studies, we find that the use of feminine language causes individuals to perceive political candidates as more liberal. Additionally, liberals tend to prefer candidates who use feminine language, and conservatives prefer candidates who use masculine language, regardless of the sex of the candidate. These effects are mostly mediated, however, by perceptions of candidate ideology caused by the use of language.

AbstractBackgroundThe COVID‐19 pandemic has presented unique challenges across the world in getting citizens to change their behaviors in response to a public health crisis. In the United States, it appears that partisan differences in willingness to comply with these measures have emerged: Democrats are typically more supportive than Republicans in their stated support of and willingness to comply with these measures. However, actual behaviors are notoriously hard to accurately capture with survey items.ObjectiveTo determine the extent to which county‐level partisanship influences average willingness to stay at home, and how these effects are moderated by county level characteristics.MethodsWe use personal device (cell phone) data provided by SafeGraph, aggregated at the county‐level, to determine how county‐level partisanship is correlated with willigness to stay at home. We additionally test whether these effects are conditional upon the prevalence of COVID‐19 in the county, and the percentage of the county under 30 years old.ResultsWe find that county‐level partisanship predicts aggregate level compliance with social distancing behavior—citizens of counties that are more Republican spend more time away from home than Democratic counties. We find that the number of COVID‐19 cases in the county and the percentage of the county under the age of 30 moderate these effects.ConclusionPartisanship appears to be a powerful predictor, at the county‐level, of willigness to follow stay at home orders in the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Seemingly, gender, language, and partisanship are intertwined concepts. We believe that the use of gendered language in political settings may be used strategically by political elites. The purpose of this paper is to craft a tool for scholars to test the interconnection between politics, gender, and language—what we refer to as being the gendered language and partisanship nexus. We test our prediction using original word rating data. From our test, we find significant variation across seven hundred words in ratings as masculine and feminine and discover that words rated as masculine are more likely to be rated as dominant and negatively valenced. We additionally find that Republican men are most likely to rate words as more masculine. Using this dictionary, we find that Republican presidents are more likely to use masculine language than Democratic presidents in their State of the Union addresses and that the Republican Party uses more masculine language than the Democratic Party in their official party platform.

Political scientists have long been interested in the effects that media framings have on support or tolerance for controversial speech. In recent years, the concept of cancel culture has complicated our understanding of free speech. In particular, the modern Republican Party under Donald Trump has made "fighting cancel culture" a cornerstone of its electoral strategy. We expect that when extremist groups invoke cancel culture as a reason for their alleged censorship, support for their free speech rights among Republicans should increase. We use a nationally representative survey experiment to assess whether individuals' opposition to cancel culture is principled or contingent on the ideological identity of the speaker. We show that framing free speech restrictions as the consequence of cancel culture does not increase support for free speech among Republicans. Further, when left-wing groups utilize the cancel culture framing, Republicans become even less supportive of those groups' free speech rights.