The Fairer but Less Electable Sex?: Perceptions of a Candidate's Ability to Win

• In Event: Candidates' Personal Characteristics and Their Performance

Abstract

Electability, defined as the ability to win a general election contest, plays a notable role in individuals’ primary voting decisions (e.g. Abramowitz 1989; Rickershauser and Aldrich 2007; Simas 2017). The question then becomes one of how these perceptions of a candidate’s electability are formed. Though expectations are typically bent to coincide with preferences (e.g. Granberg and Brent 1983), candidate positions and characteristics also undoubtedly play a role. In this project, I test for the impact of one particularly salient attribute: candidate sex.

On one hand, there is evidence to suggest that women may be considered more electable than men. Politically ambitious women are more sensitive to strategic concerns (Fulton et al. 2005) and subsequently, are more likely to win when they enter races. For example, in the 2020 primaries, women made up only 28% of the candidates but 34% of the winners (Conroy and Rakich 2020). However, closer examinations of both observational and experimental data reveal a sex-based quality gap that instead suggests that women may in fact face significant biases (e.g. Fulton 2011; Bauer 2020).

To isolate how sex effects perceptions of electability, I embedded an original experiment in a module of the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES; formerly CCES). Analyses of these data will show whether or not women are considered less electable than men. In addition, I also gathered pretreatment information on (1) each subject’s own level of sexism; and (2) each subject’s perceptions of sexism in the electorate as a whole. These measures will allow to me explore how opinions about electability vary across individuals and whether over/underestimation of the actual levels of sexism in the electorate (as gauged by comparing individual perceptions to the responses of the full CES sample) also shapes the way people think about candidates’ chances of victory. In total, this work will contribute to understanding of both the electoral context that women face and how voters distinguish between candidates from the same party.

Author

• Elizabeth N. Simas