Gender Stereotyping and the Electoral Success of Women Candidates: New Evidence from Local Elections in the United States

Sarah F Anzia,Rachel Bernhard

doi:10.1017/s0007123421000570

Abstract

AbstractResearch shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet, most research examines a single context at a time—usually US national elections, where partisanship is strong—and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens’ responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women's win rates relative to men's match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.

Highlights

The literature on women in US politics has devoted considerable attention to two questions: Do voters use gender stereotypes in evaluating candidates? And does gender stereotyping affect women’s chances of being elected? The answer to the first is “yes”: some voters infer that women candidates are more liberal than men, more compassionate and collaborative, and more competent on certain issues like education, though the prevalence of such stereotyping may be lower today than in the past (Hayes and Lawless 2016)
Column 1 of Table 2 presents the estimates for city council. (To conserve space, we show only the main coefficient estimates in Table 2, but these models include all of the controls from Table 1.) The coefficient on Woman indicates that in cities of average Republicanism, women are 3.3 percentage points more likely to win than men
The literature on women in politics shows that many voters use gender stereotypes when evaluating candidates, but in studying how gender stereotyping affects elections, research has focused almost exclusively on national and state elections, where partisanship provides powerful cues about the candidates

Summary

Introduction

The literature on women in US politics has devoted considerable attention to two questions: Do voters use gender stereotypes in evaluating candidates? And does gender stereotyping affect women’s chances of being elected? The answer to the first is “yes”: some voters infer that women candidates are more liberal than men, more compassionate and collaborative, and more competent on certain issues like education (see, for example, Alexander and Andersen 1993; Huddy and Terkildsen 1993a; Kahn 1996), though the prevalence of such stereotyping may be lower today than in the past (Hayes and Lawless 2016). Research shows that individuals are more likely to rely on stereotypes when they have less information about candidates (see, for example, Berinsky et al 2020; Matson and Fine 2006; McDermott 1997; McDermott 1998), and that the average voter in on-cycle local elections—those held concurrently with national elections—has less information about local candidates and issues than the average voter in off-cycle local elections (de Benedictis-Kessner 2018; Oliver and Ha 2007) This implies that if any differences we find in men’s and women’s win rates are attributable to stereotyping, they should be most pronounced in on-cycle elections. There should be more research on women in local elections

Methods

Results

Conclusion