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Gender Stereotypes, Political Leadership, and Voting Behavior in Tunisia

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Abstract

Although female political representation in the Arab world has nearly doubled in the last decade, little is known about how voters in the region view female politicians and their political platforms, particularly in a new democracy like Tunisia. We conduct original conjoint and vignette survey experiments to examine the effects of candidate gender and gender- and leadership-congruent political platforms on voter support. Building on role congruity theory, we find evidence of bias against female candidates among voters, particularly among respondents who hold patriarchal gender norms. Additionally, we find that all respondents are more likely to prefer candidates who emphasize security issues rather than women’s rights. Overall, our study suggests that female candidates who emphasize issues congruent with stereotypes of political leadership, such as security, can increase voter support, though respondents also reward male candidates who appeal to leadership congruent issues.

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Fig. 1

Source Arab Barometer, Wave 4

Fig. 2

Source Marsad Majles (2019)

Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Source Local Election Candidate Survey (LECS) (Blackman et al. 2018; Clark et al. 2018)

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Notes

  1. We conceptualize a political platform as the issue areas on which the politician focuses and campaigns. Indeed, both a candidate’s experience and issue platform are used as a political tool to discredit female candidates (Murray 2008) or are used by female political candidates seeking to engage in counter stereotypical messaging (Cryer 2018).

  2. The mixed findings in the literature on gender in politics can be attributed to a variety of factors. First, within the research that uses an experimental approach, leadership qualities are often operationalized in different ways. Moreover, in much of the discourse concerning support for female candidates, voters often cite an additional reason for why women do not receive the vote: the gendered differences in the candidates’ political experience or policy areas (Eddy 2013; PEW 2015).

  3. Since existing research provides support for both interpretations of role congruity theory, more recent research has looked explicitly at how the domestic political context or the issue areas that candidates emphasize alter the expectations of how role congruity theory operates across distinct contexts (Holman et al. 2016; Lawless 2004).

  4. This is what we refer to as the leadership congruent or gender incongruent strategy.

  5. Bauer (2017) finds this effect among non-co-partisans.

  6. In addition to these legal changes, the state established the Union nationale de la femme tunisienne (UNFT), or the National Union of Tunisian Women, expanded educational opportunities for both men and women, and included some female candidates on the dominant political party’s electoral lists.

  7. Figure A.1 in the Online Appendix displays the levels of female political representation across North Africa between 1997 and 2017.

  8. They document this shift by focusing on the rise of a more vibrant civil society and public sphere in Tunisia following the uprising, noting the diverse, grassroots women’s organizations involved in contentious debates on the issue of women’s rights and the controversial Article 28 of the country’s constitution. Article 28 of Tunisia’s new constitution, which guarantees the rights of Tunisian women, originally contained language in an early draft that referred to women as ‘complementary’ to men. This reference was later removed.

  9. The electoral laws also included list quotas for youth (individuals under 40) and disabled persons. See Government of Tunisia (2014, 2017) for the full electoral laws. The vertical parity requirement was in place for the National Constituent Assembly elections in 2011. For the 2018 municipal elections, the government strengthened the quota law by requiring horizontal parity as well. Under this requirement, parties or movements competing in more that one municipality were required to have female heads for half of their lists.

  10. The exact number of female deputies varies over the five-year electoral cycle based on which MPs are selected to serve in the cabinet and how that cabinet changes. When an elected MP is selected to serve in the cabinet, the next person on the electoral list replaces him or her. This means that the number of female MPs is subject to change based on cabinet appointments and reshuffling. For more on the 2010–2011 uprising and voting behavior in Tunisia’s 2011 and 2014 elections, see Anderson (2011); Berman and Nugent (2015); Chomiak and Entelis (2011); and Lefèvre (2015).

  11. In 2014, 68 women were elected (31.3% of the ARP), but 72 women were seated because several men were selected as ministers (National Democratic Institute 2015). The number of women in parliament increased with subsequent cabinet reshuffling.

  12. It is worth noting here that most interviewees emphasized that these conservative norms are not exclusive to the members or supporters of only one particular party, but transcend partisan affiliation. In addition, issues (1) and (3) tend to be categorized as supply-side challenges, while (2) and (4) are viewed as more demand-side obstacles (Paxton et al. 2007).

  13. For an example of a recent study that examines the impact of a women’s quota on political actors’ changing electoral strategies, see Bush and Gao (2017). The authors argue that gender quotas create incentives for political actors to nominate women, especially in cases when the political groups are relatively small or weak, and the quota increases their group’s likelihood of success.

  14. Interestingly, a recent study by Bush and Prather (2018) found that voters were less likely to contact their representative when primed to think of a mixed gender group of politicians rather than a group of only female politicians, which the authors attribute to a preference for gender segregation among religiously conservative voters.

  15. Author interview and translation (with Souad Bayouli), July 5, 2017.

  16. Author interview and translation (with Bochra Bel Hadj Hmida), July 14, 2017.

  17. Author interview and translation (with Heger Bouzemmi), July 18, 2017.

  18. Author interview (with Riadh Bachoucha), July 4, 2017. The gender gap exists for voter turnout and other measures of general political participation as well. Though 46% of registered voters were women in 2014 (Gahler 2014), women are less likely to vote (Arab Barometer 2016). Additionally, women are less likely to attend campaign rallies and meetings, with only 4% of women reporting attending such events during the 2014 elections compared to 19% of men (Arab Barometer 2016). Across North Africa, a gender gap also extends to key political attitudes, such as trust in political institutions and beliefs about the neutrality of those institutions (Buehler 2016).

  19. Author interview and translation (with Samia Abbou), July 18, 2017.

  20. Between 2012 and 2016, Algeria also had over 30% female representation in the national parliament, but with cabinet changes, Tunisia’s female representation in parliament was typically higher at roughly 35%.

  21. Women make up 47% of local council representatives despite strict vertical and horizontal parity laws aimed at increasing women’s representation to 50%. Women represent less than 20% of municipal council heads (mayors) (BabNet 2018).

  22. See Agence France-Presse (2016) and Meddeb (2015).

  23. The view of women as cultural leaders is not consistent across space or time in Tunisia. As Charrad (1997) writes: “Depending on the political struggles in which it was involved, the political leadership of Tunisia has defined women alternatively as a repository of cultural identity, potential supporters in the quest for modernity, voices to be silenced, or allies against militant Islamic extremism” (p. 286).

  24. Several studies examine the role of female politicians and candidates in Islamist, tribal, or conservative parties in the Middle East (e.g., Bush and Gao 2017; Clark and Schwedler 2003). Moreover, research indicates that many women often hold conservative religious or patriarchal views (Blaydes and Linzer 2008).

  25. Economic issues do not have a clear gender valence in the Tunisian context. This mixed view on politician gender and economic issues extends to the United States. Dolan (2010) finds that women and men are evaluated roughly equally on competency measures related to the economy. Provins (2017) shows that—while commerce has a masculine valence—issue areas like labor, employment, welfare, and poverty are perceived as neutral issue areas with no gendered association.

  26. Gender, age, education, and employment measures in the household survey are consistent with national averages. The online YouGov sample is younger and more educated than the overall population. These panels have been used in other political science research (e.g., Nyhan and Zeitzoff 2018). Our data and replication files are available at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HPMEVO.

  27. We modify the questions on women in society from the third wave of the Arab Barometer and from the sixth wave of the Afrobarometer. These questions are also included in the World Values Survey and used in other studies of gender-based attitudes (McDaniel 2008).

  28. We eliminate respondents who respond “Don’t Know” or “Refuse to Answer” on all of the patriarchal values questions in the household survey. There is no non-response in the online survey.

  29. This represents a 46% decrease relative to the mean of the BJKA sample and a 71% decrease relative to the mean of the YouGov sample. The correlation of respondent gender with patriarchal attitudes is in line with earlier research, which shows that men and women view politicians, as well as men and women generally, differently (Hayes and McAllister 1997; McDaniel 2008; Ridgeway et al. 2009). This is not to say that all women share a common conception of women’s rights. Recent research by Klar (2018) presents evidence from the U.S. that gender appeals can serve to exacerbate partisan differences between women around the issue of feminism. Khalil (2014) shows similar divides among Tunisian women regarding women’s rights. This is also in line with previous research that shows that female respondents are more likely on average to report that they would vote for a women than male respondents (Benstead et al. 2015; Masoud et al. 2016; Sanbonmatsu 2002).

  30. For other examples of candidate conjoint experiments, see Hainmueller et al. (2014); Kirkland and Coppock (2018); Teele et al. (2018); and Ono and Burden (2019) in the United States; Franchino and Zucchini (2015) in Italy; Carnes and Lupu (2016) in Britain, Argentina, and the United States; and Horiuchi et al. (2016) in Japan.

  31. In the BJKA survey, we include Ennahda, Nidaa Tounes, Afek Tounes, Popular Front (Jabha Shabiyya), Free Patriotic Union, Machrouu Tounes, Current of Love, Initiative Party, Democratic Current, and al-Irada Movement. In the YouGov survey, we reduce the included parties to Ennahda, Nidaa Tounes, Popular Front (Jabha Shabiyya), Democratic Current, and an independent candidate list.

  32. In the household survey, the possible ages are 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and, in the online survey, the possible ages are 33, 42, 51, 60, 71.

  33. Following Hainmueller and Hopkins (2015), however, the order of the attributes does not change within respondent.

  34. We collected information regarding the sex, profession, age, and party of current members of parliament from the Marsad Majles website: https://majles.marsad.tn/2014/fr/assemblee. For an illustration of the distribution of MPs’ professions by gender, see Fig. A.2 in the Online Appendix.

  35. The values are randomized such that the respondent never has to choose between identical profiles and such that the respondent does not see the same pairwise comparison more than once.

  36. There are only 217 seats in the national assembly, while there are 350 municipal councils that vary from 12 to 60 members depending on the population size of the municipality. In our pre-analysis plan, we originally hypothesized that the level of government would impact the degree of support for female candidates (Fox and Oxley 2003; Meeks 2012), but our results do not show significant differences in the impact of politician gender between the municipal and the parliamentary levels, thus we pool the responses. Our pre-analysis plan is available at: http://egap.org/registration/2783. In the online survey, we alter the prompt to focus just on national elections.

  37. We include this option based on focus group feedback that the forced choice might make people opt out of the survey completely as a result of high political disillusionment and political polarization in the country. In order to address this, we run all conjoint analyses on the subset of people who responded to every set of paired candidates, a group we name the “Always Responders,” though the results are robust to using the full sample. In the online survey, we ask: “If you had to choose, which candidate would you prefer as the head of list?” in order to make the question more clear.

  38. Despite concerns about the external validity of hypothetical vignettes (Dolan 2010), this type of experimental approach allows us to isolate the effects of political experience and candidate gender, which, in turn, afford us a high level of internal validity (Morton and Williams 2010; Mutz 2011).

  39. We tested several candidate names through interviews and focus groups to ensure the name “Miriam” was (1) contextually relevant and (2) devoid of any biased economic, political, or socio-demographic associations.

  40. The specific wording of each vignette is available in the Online Appendix.

  41. We selected Ahmed by looking at the most common males names in the current parliament that appear across party lines.

  42. In our pre-registration plan, we discuss our two measures of voter support: (1) the individual’s level of support and (2) the individual’s estimate of how much support the candidate will receive within the community. Both are survey measures. We focus on the first measure in this paper because role congruity theory is focused on individual preferences rather than the expectations of the community.

  43. Using this method, our sample includes 33.1% Always Responders. Women and respondents who report voting in the 2014 elections were more likely to be Always Responders. Few profile traits predict non-response; for instance, having to choose between two female candidates did not cause non-response. However, having to choose between two profiles that both emphasize women’s issues does cause respondents to be more likely to say that they do not like either and opt out.

  44. The results are robust to including all responses.

  45. This approach follows that recommended by Leeper et al. (2019).

  46. We list ten possible choices: Job creation (502), Improve the economic situation (215), Fight corruption (136), Improve security (127), Improve infrastructure (99), Fight extremism (26), Improve women’s rights (13), Strengthen democracy (13), Curb foreign influence (10), and Other (10). We categorize Job creation, Improve the economic situation, Fight corruption, Improve infrastructure as economic issues. Security issues include: Improve security and Fight Extremism.

  47. See Fig. A.3 in the Online Appendix.

  48. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion. This follows the procedure used in Clayton et al. (2019).

  49. In the analysis, we include respondent fixed effects and cluster the errors at the level of the respondent.

  50. As with the conjoint, we subset the sample and run the same analysis only with respondents who stated that economic issues were their main priority. The results hold; female candidates that appeal to security issues are more likely to gain voters’ support. Results are displayed in Fig. A.8 the Online Appendix.

  51. Benstead et al. (2015) is a notable exception but focuses on candidate gender and religiosity rather than political priorities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York University, Abu Dhabi Campus, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Alexandra Domike Blackman

  2. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Marlette Jackson

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  1. Alexandra Domike Blackman
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Alexandra Blackman is a Post-Doctoral Associate (Division of Social Science) at New York University Abu Dhabi, and Marlette Jackson is the Assistant Director of Equity and Inclusion at the Stanford School of Engineering. Author names are listed alphabetically. This research received IRB approval from Stanford University (IRB-39949). We would like to thank Stanford’s Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) Center and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) for their generous support of this project. We also thank Caroline Abadeer, Aala Abdelgadir, Claire Adida, Chantal Berman, Lisa Blaydes, Daniel Chen, Lauren Davenport, Amaney Jamal, Haemin Jee, David Laitin, Kim Meredith, Rebecca Morton, Kerry Persen, Jonathan Rodden, Shea Streeter, and Jeremy Weinstein for their feedback at various stages of this project. We are grateful for the generous feedback on earlier drafts from several anonymous reviewers, as well as participants in several workshops including the 2017 WESSI Florence workshop and the Stanford PACS workshop. We also thank the teams at YouGov MENA and BJKA Consulting in Tunis, and especially, Samy Kallel and Manel Mansouri, for their assistance with this survey. Intissar Samarat provided valuable research assistance. All errors and omissions remain ours.

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Blackman, A.D., Jackson, M. Gender Stereotypes, Political Leadership, and Voting Behavior in Tunisia. Polit Behav 43, 1037–1066 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09582-5

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