Abstract
A prominent explanation for why women are significantly underrepresented in public office in the U.S. is that stereotypes lead voters to favor male candidates over female candidates. Yet whether voters actually use a candidate’s sex as a voting heuristic in the presence of other common information about candidates remains a surprisingly unsettled question. Using a conjoint experiment that controls for stereotypes, we show that voters are biased against female candidates but in some unexpected ways. The average effect of a candidate’s sex on voter decisions is small in magnitude, is limited to presidential rather than congressional elections, and appears only among male voters. More importantly, independent voters display the greatest negative bias against female candidates. The results suggest that partisanship works as a kind of “insurance” for voters who can be sure that the party affiliation of the candidate will represent their views in office regardless of the sex of the candidate.
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Notes
We generally use the term sex rather than gender, although we note that it is unclear which is the more accurate way to describe how candidates present themselves and how voters perceive those presentations. Our experiments follow popular usage by describing candidates dichotomously as either male or female and do not explore the subtleties of gendered factors such as visual presentation by candidates.
The Kirkland and Coppock (forthcoming) study differs from ours in two important ways. First, the authors compare elections with and without party labels, but do not examine elections where both candidates are from the same party. Second, their experiment does not tell respondents what office is being sought. Instead, the experiment varies the previous office held by the candidate, ranging from local offices such as city council to representative in Congress. It is possible that respondents infer what office is being sought by the backgrounds that are presented to them in each candidate pairing.
It is important to control for policy positions as well as party labels in our conjoint experiment. We believe party affiliation, at least in the contemporary era, is a broader indicator to a voter about how a politician will act in office. In Congress, for instance, politicians often have to follow party leadership by giving up their own policy goals. Thus, it is likely that partisan voters still rely on a candidate’s party label independently from cues about his or her policy positions.
These values are spaced nine percentage points apart to create a total of five levels of ratings (34, 43, 52, 61, and 70%) that keep a constant interval.
The exact formulas used to estimate the effect of each attribute are explained in Hainmueller et al. (2014).
There might be a concern that conjoint experiments, which ask respondents to choose from multiple hypothetical descriptions of objects, produce biased outcomes due to the failure to accurately capture real-world decision-making. However, a study by Hainmueller et al. (2015) validated conjoint experiments against real-world behavior by employing the case of referendums in Switzerland as the behavioral benchmark. According to their study, the results of conjoint experiments closely correspond to the choices made by people under real-world conditions. Thus, we have reason to believe that our findings translate reasonably well to the real world. In addition, as we have shown in the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material, we found no evidence to suggest that our respondents made artificial judgments when they were exposed to candidate pairs with less plausible profile combinations.
The order is fixed across ten pairs for each respondent to minimize his or her cognitive burden.
This design creates some combinations of candidate attributes that would be rare in real elections. For instance, voters seldom encounter a candidate who is female, black, Republican, pro-choice, and who wants to increase taxes. Such implausible combinations may introduce some biases to the results by leading our subjects to make artificial judgments without much cognitive effort (Auspurg et al. 2009). However, as we show in the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material, the likelihood of having implausible combinations is limited, and the results remain almost the same even after excluding those combinations. We address this issue at greater length in the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material using response timers to assess whether respondents take the experiment less seriously when candidates’ policy positions seem incongruent with their party affiliations.
We randomize the order of evaluation in this way to mitigate the concern that respondents may change their behavior when they evaluate the latter five pairs of candidates.
Some might be concerned that actual voters may differ from the overall adult population. While our survey does not directly ask respondents whether they have cast a ballot in the general election, we have a measure of their political interest. Turnout and political interest are indeed highly correlated. According to data from the 2012 ANES, 92% of people who are very interested in politics report they voted in the election; in contrast, only 37% of people with no political interest report voting. However, we find that the bias against female candidates does not vary across respondents with different levels of political interest (see the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material for more details).
It is possible that voters are biased against female candidates only when it comes to the presidency and not for other executive offices such as governor and mayor. Additional experiments will be necessary to pursue these nuances of the gender-office congruency theory.
The exact questions used to measure the characteristics of our respondents are reported in the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material.
Note that we cannot rule out the possibility that the effects for male and female respondents are themselves not statistically significant from one another (p > .10).
We measure party identification using the first of the standard branching questions. That is, “leaners” are not distinguished from other independents. However, we also have a measure of attitude toward each party. Our data suggest that 41.2% of those who identified themselves as independents are truly neutral to both parties; the rest of the self-identified independents (59.8%) have an attitude leaning toward either party, but the tilt is often slight and they are almost equally split between the two parties (28.9% for Republicans and 29.9% for Democrats). We discuss more details about the distribution of leaners among independents in the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material.
The AMCE for Democrats is positive (pro-female) but not statistically significant, suggesting that candidate sex has no effect on their candidate evaluation among Democrats.
The negative bias against female candidates found among Republicans is not simply because they have imagined Hillary Clinton when they heard of female president. As we have shown in the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material, we found that disfavoring Clinton does not lead respondents (including Republicans) to show a greater bias against a female president. In addition, the results of a list experiment designed to minimize social desirability bias shows that Republicans still exhibit a much greater bias against female president than other respondents do even after controlling for the “Hillary Effect” (Burden et al. 2017).
The estimated effect for independents is 1.2 points larger than for Republicans, but the difference between them is not statistically significant (p > .10).
Among independents, both men and women exhibit bias against female candidates. In contrast, among Democrats, neither men nor women exhibit bias against female candidates; and among Republicans, only men exhibit bias against female candidates. More details about the results for subgroups defined by a respondent’s partisanship crossed with sex are shown in the Appendix in Electronic Supplementary Material.
Pew Research Center (2017).
Democrats actually favor female candidates by 1.2 percentage points, but this estimated effect is not statistically significant at the .10 level.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Michael DeCrescenzo, Sarah Khan, Spencer Piston, Eleanor Neff Powell, David P. Redlawsk, and seminar participants at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Boston University, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, and Keio University for their helpful comments on this research. We also appreciate Yusaku Horiuchi for sharing his R scripts, and Masahiro Yamada and Masahiro Zenkyo for their assistance in data collection. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and the Annual Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology. This research was financially supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (26285036; 26780078; 17K03523) and the Kwansei Gakuin University Research Grant. Yoshikuni Ono also received the JSPS postdoctoral fellowship for research abroad. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numeral results in the paper are available in the Political Behavior Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IZKZET).
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Ono, Y., Burden, B.C. The Contingent Effects of Candidate Sex on Voter Choice. Polit Behav 41, 583–607 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9464-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9464-6