Abstract
Women in politics receive more hostility online than men, at least in some settings and on some measures. Most of the evidence comes from the text of messages on Twitter. Facebook's emoji reactions offer a different record: millions of quick, public judgements of what politicians post. Do audiences react differently to the Facebook pages of women and men who lead European parties? I use 125,056 posts from the pages of 74 party leaders and leading politicians, 17 of them women, in 15 European countries from March 2016 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle. Pooled, women's pages drew about half the share of angry reactions that men's did (2.8% against 5.8% of all reactions), but this reflects party and position: the angriest pages belonged to men leading opposition parties of the radical right and left. Comparing women and men in the same country and month, with the same party family and the same position in and out of government, I find no detectable difference in the share of Love, Angry, Haha, Sad or Wow reactions, in comments or shares, or in interactions per post. The differences in Love and Angry are under half a point, with confidence intervals that rule out gaps of more than about one and a half points either way, against averages of about 6%. The result holds with controls for page size, without heads of government, without the United Kingdom, in randomisation inference and when each leader is compared with their own party's page. There are hints, resting on few pages, that women whose parties were in government drew less love and more laughter. The data cannot rule out gaps of one or two points, but they show no sign that the reactions on European leaders' pages differed by gender once party and position are taken into account.
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Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Love, Anger and Laughter: Do Women and Men Leading European Parties Get Different Reactions on Facebook?. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23403628