Explaining Women Candidates’ Strategic Vagueness during the 2019 and 2024 Belgian Federal and Regional Campaigns. The Role of Gender, Issue Types, and Precision Elements

Women candidates navigate campaigns with strategic communication. While political leadership is traditionally associated with masculine traits such as decisiveness and assertiveness, women are expected to display communal, feminine behavior. One way this tension surfaces is in their use of vague versus precise language. Vagueness has long been stereotypically associated with femininity, yet in politics it can be read as a lack of competence. This duality means that vagueness carries gendered risks that are distinct for women candidates. Existing research has widely examined vagueness at the party or candidate level, but has largely overlooked individual-level variation and the gendered meanings of vagueness. We address this gap in two ways. First, we examine how women’s use of vagueness depends on the type of issue under discussion. Second, we move beyond a uniform measure by distinguishing between precision elements with different gendered connotations: direction (masculine, signaling decisiveness) and target group references (feminine, signaling care). Analyzing 1,955 Flemish newspaper articles from the 2019 and 2024 Belgian election campaigns, we find that women’s language use is conditional rather than uniform. Women are less likely than men to present a clear direction, particularly when addressing feminine issues, while they are more likely to invoke target groups in these same domains. These patterns suggest that women strategically balance masculine and feminine stereotypes to navigate the double bind of campaigns. Following our findings we theorise that vagueness is a conditional strategy that women employ to reconcile competing expectations of competence and likability in electoral politics.