Measuring Sexism in US Elections: A Comparative Analysis of X Discourse from 2020 to 2024
Abstract
AbstractSexism continues to influence political campaigns, affecting public perceptions of candidates in a variety of ways. This paper examines sexist content on the social media platform X during the 2020 and 2024 US election campaigns, focusing on both male and female candidates. Two approaches, single-step and two-step categorization, were employed to classify tweets into different sexism categories. By comparing these approaches against a human-annotated subsample, we found that the single-step approach outperformed the two-step approach. Our analysis further reveals that sexist content increased over time, particularly between the 2020 and 2024 elections, indicating that female candidates face a greater volume of sexist tweets compared to their male counterparts. Compared to human annotations, GPT-4 struggled with detecting sexism, reaching an accuracy of about 51%. Given both the low agreement among the human annotators and the obtained accuracy of the model, our study emphasizes the challenges in detecting complex social phenomena such as sexism.