Playing the Dad Card: How and When Men Highlight Familial Roles in Political Campaigns

The study of gender in political campaigns often centers on the candidacies of women (e.g. Kahn 1996, Bauer 2013, 2017), and offers insights into how women navigate around or engage with their roles as mothers while running for office (Bell and Kaufman 2015, Deason, Greenlee and Langner 2015, Stalsburg 2010). Less research has concentrated on how gender shapes the candidacies of men, who also are shaped by and react to the ways in which gender and gender roles shift over time and across contexts. Our interest is in how fatherhood and other familial relationships are portrayed in men’s political appeals. This work contributes to scholarship that that has probed how male candidates engage with gendered issues (Dolan 2005, Bystrom et al 2014, Windett 2014), gendered traits (Bauer 2022, Bystrom et al 2014), and gender stereotypes (Schneider 2014, Bauer 2020, Cassese and Holman 2018) in U.S. elections. Yet, one point of departure in our study is that while other scholarship has studied captured men as a point of comparison in studies that focus on women’s candidacies, in this project, we focus on men and explore the individual and contextual factors which lead men to highlight their familial relationships and roles in political campaigns. Building off work by Deason (2011, 2021), we zero in on how men shift the gendered appeal of their campaign by making use of their families. We hypothesize that male candidates are most likely to highlight their familial identities, to use women family members as surrogates in ads, talk about their role as a father/grandfather, and portray their families in ads when they face off against women candidates in competitive elections. We test these hypotheses with data from the Wesleyan Media Project - televised political ads that aired on broadcast or cable television in each of the nation’s media markets during 2018 and 2020. While some scholarship has focused on the role of familial appeals in presidential elections (Elder and Greene 2012, Burge et al 2019) and congressional races (Stalsburg and Kleinberg 2016), in this study we look at gubernatorial races in order to observe a level of electoral politics where women candidates have been plentiful, competitive, and successful (Wilkerson and Jeydel 2023) and as a result, male candidates may be more likely to adjust their campaign approach to better compete. In measuring these types of familial appeals, we code hundreds of gubernatorial ads, capturing detail surrounding the ways in which candidates portray their own familial roles and contributing to an important literature on how gender shapes political campaigns. We also add to broader work about the use of “the personal” in campaigns for public office (McGregor et al 2017). In our view, the shifting norms around gender that accompany women’s greater participation in electoral politics, as well as shifting gender norms outside of the political area, leave space for men to embrace familial roles – particularly fatherhood – and elevate the voices of women in their families in ways that prior generations of male candidates have not.