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Political representation has increasingly taken place online. Electoral campaigns are conducted, representative claims are made, and judgements about who speaks for whom are formed on platforms whose governing logics of personalization, visibility, and engagement were not always designed with democratic inclusion in mind. For women in politics, this transformation is profoundly ambivalent. Social media allows candidates to bypass party and media gatekeepers that have historically marginalized them, to build their own political image, and to communicate directly with constituents. Yet the same platforms amplify gendered hostility and create new pressures of visibility. Whether digital campaigning widens or narrows women's pathways to political representation therefore remains an open question that depends on context.
The panel situates that ambivalence in comparative perspective. Research on gender, political communication, and digital politics has been dominated by evidence from established Western democracies, while most women politicians worldwide campaign under different institutional, cultural, and platform conditions. The panel therefore invites scholars working on and from the Global South and the Global North, understood critically rather than as fixed categories, to present and discuss empirical evidences and theoretical ideas around four questions: How do women pursue and perform representation as social media reshapes electoral campaigning in different political contexts? Under what conditions do self-personalization and candidate-centred communication empower women candidates, and under what conditions do they reproduce existing tensions and constraints or create new ones? How do citizens in different settings respond to women's representative claims online, and what does online violence against women in politics tell us about representation itself? How would theories of gender, communication, and democracy change if they were built on a genuinely global evidence base?
The panel welcomes conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions on these and related questions, concerning any region, based on comparative or single-case designs, and from scholars at all career stages. Beside, where a paper's argument requires it, the panel is open to creative modes of in-person presentation, such as visual, video, or multimedia material. We aim to promote a cross-regional dialogue that makes the study of gender, digital politics, and political communication more inclusive and theoretically richer.