Abstract
Different stereotypes exist for women politicians in a way that is not true for men; a difference that may affect voter evaluations. While some research concludes that these stereotypes disadvantage women candidates, other findings suggest there is no effect, or that women may have some advantages. I employ three unique experiments to offer insight to this disconnect, expanding the knowledge of stereotypes about the goals of legislative vs. executive offices and female politicians in these roles. This analysis provides insight into how the type of office matters, sharpening our understanding of gender stereotypes in candidate evaluation. I find that stereotypes of women in these offices are unique from those of an ungendered officeholder or male officeholders and stereotypes of women are vastly positive, but that these positive stereotypes never equate to an electoral feminine advantage and may penalize a woman with traits counter to the stereotype of the office.
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Notes
A large and conflicted literature exists about whether and when stereotypes matter to voters. For the purposes of this paper, I assume that—at least in some conditions and in some ways—the existence of stereotypes may matter to voters (see Bauer, 2017).
Fox and Oxley (2003) classify feminine offices as those that deal explicitly with a traditional feminine policy area like education.
Reliance on convenience samples, as MTurk generates, has the potential to inject bias into a study as samples are unrepresentative and tend to skew more educated and more liberal—as is the case in all three studies described in this manuscript. It should be noted that while this bias exists, a more educated and liberal sample is actually a more robust test of whether these stereotypes exist since liberals (Sanbonmatsu & Dolan, 2009) and those with higher levels of education have been shown to be less prone to stereotype reliance (Bauer, 2015).
The prompt, following Schneider and Bos (2014) read, “Society is composed of many different groups about whom people in general have some knowledge. In fact, the ease with which people form relatively well-defined impressions about the individuals and social groups that surround them greatly simplifies their social life. On many occasions, either through hearsay or direct contact, we find out something about the impressions that people in general have about social groups. In this study, you will be asked to give your opinion about what people in general think about some social groups. Naturally, the impressions that people in general have about social groups may or may not reflect your personal beliefs. So give your answers based on what you know to be the culturally shared beliefs people in general have about those social groups, whether or not you believe those ideas to be true.”.
For example, “educated” and “well-educated” were both prevalent responses across conditions and would have both met the standard for inclusion in the master list. These were combined into “well-educated” to avoid unnecessary repetition in the list. Synonyms like “arrogant” and “stuck-up” were combined into the more concise arrogant.
Augmentation of the trait list using those that appeared in previous research follows the approach utilized by Schneider and Bos (2014) in their examination of the female politician subtype.
Recent analysis of the electorate would suggest the Democratic skew of this sample is not inconsistent with party affiliation in the general population, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-like-by-party-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/.
In both study 1 and 2 participants were given examples of each type of office at each level of office to avoid any misunderstanding of what constituted a legislative vs. executive office.
Inter-coder reliability was .864 (Cohen’s Kappa) across two independent coders. Disagreement was resolved by a third independent coder.
Not all of the adjectives (have an available ranking in this dataset. The adjective is rated by the researcher when it is otherwise unavailable. One trait, wealthy, was coded as negative despite a positive valence in ANEW because the wealth is generally viewed negatively in a political context.
As in Bauer (2019), these vignettes used photos and names of two candidates Mary/Mark Buckley. Bauer pre-tested the names and photos separately and found no statistically significant differences in average evaluation of age, education, or attractiveness.
These three measures notably each have their flaws in candidate evaluation. Vote choice potentially lacks realism in an experimental setting that offers no choice of candidates (Brooks, 2013) and could provoke social desirability biases that inflate support for the female candidate (Krupnikov et al., 2016). Viability assessments may avoid these pitfalls but have been noted as using an implicitly gendered standard in an implicitly gendered environment to prompt participant assessment (Claassen & Ryan, 2016).
Only traits chosen, on average, by 30% or more of respondents across all office types are included in this analysis.
Cronbach’s Alpha .809.
Cronbach’s Alpha .902.
Across all conditions, the Communal Ratio ranged from 0 to .94 and the Agentic Ratio ranged from 0 to .96, with communal having a mean of .09 and agentic having a mean .31.
The few traits on which the generic officeholder and male officeholders differ produce more positive stereotypes for the generic officeholder in the comparison which, in turn, makes a comparison between a female officeholder and a generic officeholder (Table 3) a more robust test of the existence of a female subtype. See Online Appendix B for comparisons of the generic and male officeholders.
Analyses are limited to just the most frequently attributed traits to make the analysis and corresponding narrative based on only those traits most frequently identified. Additional comparisons between conditions are available upon request.
Bauer (2019) notes, and it applies equally here that a social desirability bias may contribute to the more positive attributions women receive (also see Burden et al., 2017; Claassen & Ryan, 2016; Krupnikov et al., 2016; Streb et al., 2008). The methodology used in this study, however, allowed for participants to attribute as many traits from the list as they desired, so attribution was not a zero-sum game. I suspect this makes it less likely that women were over-attributed or men under-attributed.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at the 2020 Southern Political Science Association meeting and the 2019 International Society of Political Psychology meeting. I am grateful for funding from the American Political Science Association Small Grants Fund and the Chatham University Research Sabbatical Committee and appreciate comments on earlier drafts from Nichole Bauer, Erin Cassese, Kathy Dolan, Heather Ondercin, and Mirya Holman. Special thanks to my undergraduate research assistants Sivan Nizan, Hanna Theile, and Miranda Bruno who helped with coding. Replication materials are available at: https://www.jenniesweet-cushman.com/research.
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Sweet-Cushman, J. Legislative vs. Executive Political Offices: How Gender Stereotypes Can Disadvantage Women in Either Office. Polit Behav 44, 411–434 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09721-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09721-x