Age, Misinformation, and Voting for Female Candidates

• In Event: When We Were Young: Gender, Age, and Politics

Abstract

Compared to their older counterparts in the population, young people express higher levels of interest in electing a larger number of women to public office. Greater support for female candidates among the young is expected given their progressive attitudes about gender roles. However, these stated preferences run contrary to some experiments showing more support for female candidates among older respondents. We suggest that this disjuncture is partly due to differing degrees of knowledge. In particular, young people are especially misinformed about how many women are in elective office and this may lead them to display less support for female candidates than their values would suggest they should.

Our empirical analysis proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, we field a nationally representative survey of the public to assess what Americans know about the representation of women. Respondents show tremendous variation in what Americans believe about the prevalence of women in Congress and their state legislatures. Most people overestimate how many women have been elected, but this misinformation reduces with age. Multivariate analysis confirms that young people are especially prone to overestimating how many seats are held by women. This pattern holds despite controlling for education and political interests, and is sharper among male respondents. In addition, having a memory of being personally represented by a woman in Congress or the state legislature in the past tends to inflate overestimates further. Erroneous thinking among the young may produce an “ignorance is bliss” effect by reducing the apparent need to elect more women to office and raising levels of trust in government. In contrast, more realistic beliefs among older people make the dominance of men in public office more apparent and actionable.

In the second stage of our research, we examine more directly whether support for female candidates is affected by what people believe about the representation of women. In another nationally representative survey, respondents are asked to read a mundane but fake newspaper story about a member of Congress accepting a new committee assignment. Importantly, the gender of the candidate is randomly varied. Our expectation is that respondents presented with a story about a male member of Congress will lower their estimates of how many women are elected and will be more likely to vote for female candidates. Following the exposure to the story, respondents are asked to do two different exercises. First, they participate in a conjoint experiment in which the genders and other traits of two hypothetical congressional candidates are randomly varied. Because the experiment randomly varies many attributes about the candidates, it can reveal in an unobtrusive fashion whether respondents are biased for or against candidates who are female. Second, they are asked the same question analyzed above about the representation of women in Congress. To the degree that these two outcomes – demonstrated bias based on candidate gender and beliefs about the prevalence of women in office – are affected by the gender of the member of Congress in the news story, our study can identify the mechanisms causing young people to vote for women at lower rates than their political values alone would dictate.

Authors

• Barry C. Burden, University of Wisconsin

• Yoshikuni Ono, Waseda University