The Strategic Smile: Gendered facial expressions in electoral campaigns

Voters hold gender-based stereotypes of male and female candidates and often evaluate them on these grounds. This bias extends beyond policy areas to personality traits, with many voters stereotyping male candidates as tough and aggressive while expecting female candidates to be gentle, compassionate, and likable. Existing research indicates that female candidates adopt strategic behaviors during election campaigns, utilizing more positive and less negative emotive language than their male counterparts. This study examined whether these gender differences also manifest in candidates’ facial expressions during election campaigns. Our analysis of campaign pictures used by over 10,000 candidates in Japan’s national elections from 1996 to 2024 revealed that female candidates smiled more often than their male counterparts. Moreover, female candidates received fewer votes when they did not smile in their campaign photos. These findings suggest that female candidates are strategically motivated to conform to gender-typical behaviors to appeal to voters and avoid electoral backlash.