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Voting for women in recent Canadian elections

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

While the number of women standing as candidates in federal elections in Canada has surged, it is unclear how voters respond to the increased presence of women in politics. In this paper, we study who votes for women candidates in four recent federal elections. Using Canadian Election Study data and biographical information on candidates for the 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2021 federal elections, we examine the impact of the presence of women candidates on voting in Canadian elections. Leveraging the individual-level nature of our data, we also explore heterogeneity in voting for women candidates, with specific attention to patterns of gender affinity voting, and the moderating effects of gender consciousness and gender attitudes on voting for women. Our findings are similar to previous work in failing to show much evidence of an electoral disadvantage for women candidates. We also find very little evidence of heterogeneity in this basic null effect in terms of voters’ gender or their gender attitudes.

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Notes

  1. We acknowledge that focusing on a dichotomous operationalization of candidate sex limits our understanding of the role of gender and gender identity in politics (Bittner and Goodyear-Grant 2017). However, the survey and candidate data we use do not allow moving beyond this dichotomy. While newer data collection efforts (Johnson et al. 2021) provide information on candidates who identify as non-binary for the 2019 election, the share of candidates for whom this applies is too small to quantitatively assess patterns of affinity voting for this specific group.

  2. While Durovic and Mayer (2022) find evidence of a connection between sexist attitudes and voting for radical right wing parties this only holds for Zemmour’s Reconquête! party and not for the Rassemblement national.

  3. We acknowledge that this approach does not allow confirming whether it is indeed the characteristics of a candidate (and their gender in particular) that motivate voters’ choices versus some other determinants of the vote choice. An alternative approach would be to make use of questions that ask voters directly about the motivations for their vote choice. There are some doubts, however, about voters’ ability of introspection (see, e.g., Nisbett and Wilson 1977).

  4. The inclusion of party dummies means that we effectively account for all party-specific characteristics that might affect voters’ choices, including party leaders and their gender.

  5. Given that previous work has shown that the incumbency effect in Canada is similarly strong for men and women candidates (Sevi 2023), we focus on the overall incumbency effect across candidates.

  6. Note that the main effect of respondent’s sex is a constant across choice alternatives and is therefore not estimated.

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Acknowledgements

This project was initiated while all co-authors were affiliated with the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy at the Université de Montréal. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the CSDC Graduate Student Conference, Québec (1–2 April 2022), the Political Studies Association’s Undergraduate Conference (8 April 2022), and at the 2022 CPSA Conference (30 May–3 June 2022). We thank all participants for comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to students of the course POL3015, les élections at the Université de Montréal for the feedback they provided through a review-task.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Thomas Gareau-Paquette

  2. Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    Amanda Léal, Matthew Taylor, Virginie Vandewalle & Ruth Dassonneville

  3. Western University, London, Canada

    Juliette Leblanc

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  1. Thomas Gareau-Paquette
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Correspondence to Ruth Dassonneville.

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Gareau-Paquette, T., Léal, A., Leblanc, J. et al. Voting for women in recent Canadian elections. Fr Polit 22, 45–63 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-024-00236-5

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