| Popis: |
Although replication is considered an important part of the research process to gain confidence in empirical findings, it is rarely conducted in communication science. This project conducts a conceptual replication and extension of an online experiment by Bauer and Carpinella (2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917738579) to investigate the effect of gender stereotypical visual communication strategies on evaluations of politicians inside (study 1) and outside (study 2) election campaigns. Bauer and Carpinella (2017) analyzed the effects of visual information reinforcing masculine (e.g., images of business people and soldiers) and feminine (e.g., images of children playing and in school) stereotypes on the evaluation of female and male politicians’ issue competencies by manipulating personal campaign websites of fictional Democratic and Republican politicians. The authors expected gender-incongruent visual information to have an effect, and gender-congruent images to have no effect on recipients. In addition, they analyzed how these images affected ratings of politicians' favorability and electoral viability to examine possible negative consequences of gender incongruent images. We conceptually replicate their study in a German context and amend it in five aspects. (1) Instead of using fictional politicians, we compare real German politicians to increase the external validity of the findings. (2) We use Twitter profiles instead of personal websites as this channel is now of greater importance for political actors. (3) Gender stereotypes can relate either to the attribution of issue competencies but also to perceived character traits. Whereas Bauer & Carpinella (2017) focus on issue competencies, we also include character traits as independent variable to draw a complete picture. (4) We consider participants' political orientation and gender as controls. (5) Finally, the real-world context allows us to test whether gender stereotypes are activated differently inside election and outside election campaigns due to different media attention and thus differently affect the perception of politicians. Study 1 is set in the context of the election campaign for the 2021 German federal election and compares politicians from the right-wing populist AfD with those from Bündnis 90/Die Grünen as an example of a center-left party. Study 2 will build on these findings and replicates the experiment outside the campaign context |
