Gendered Attributes? Viability and Electoral Support for Presidential Candidates

• In Event: Methodological Advances in the Study of Elections

Abstract

Today, 95% of the world's presidents are men. An important question is to what extent political stereotypes drive this result. One common explanation is that voter preferences are biased toward masculine presidential candidates. Another explanation stresses that masculine politicians are perceived as more viable candidates to effectively win elections. Our paper tests key assumptions of the conventional wisdom. We first ask whether political gender stereotypes exist at all. Second, we identify which candidates' attributes contribute to multidimensional gendered stereotypes. And more importantly, we show whether different stereotypes have an electoral advantage. These advantages may be due to voters' preferences for masculine/feminine candidates or they may be due to strategic perceptions of candidate viability in open elections. Unlike all the existing empirical literature, we implement a novel conjoint survey design which omits candidate sex information. This allow us to uncover the multidimensional content of gender stereotypes for political candidates and map all the attributes into a latent dimension of “masculinity"-“femininity”. We then correlate an out-of-sample prediction of this latent dimension of political stereotypes to the electoral performance and perceived viability of political candidate profiles from the same experimental design. Our study is based on two survey experiments in the U.S. and Chile. The evidence shows, first, that voters associate several attributes with either male or female candidates (despite they ignore the candidate sex attribute). The evidence also reveals whether the latent masculinity/femininity has consequences for candidates' electoral performance and perceived viability.

Authors

• Santiago López-Cariboni, Universidad de la República

• Catherine Reyes-Housholder, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile