Gendered ideologies, gendered perceptions: do nationalist symbols and gender affect people's perceptions of politicians?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Politicians and parties employ nationalist symbols to attract public support in elections worldwide. Robust evidence indicates that the public perceives women politicians as more liberal than men politicians. The association between politicians' gender and perceived ideology, combined with the close relationship between nationalism and radical right parties, prompts the question: how do individuals evaluate women politicians when they use nationalist cues? To answer this question, we field a survey experiment in Serbia, a country with a long history of nationalist movements and a digraphic language with one of the alphabets associated with nationalism. Exploiting the Cyrillic alphabet and its association with nationalism, we find that respondents perceive women politicians who use Cyrillic as nationalist as much as men using the same symbol. However, these women are perceived as more nationalist than women and men politicians who do not employ Cyrillic. We then show that women and men respondents utilize these cues differently, indicating that the gender of nationalist politicians and members of the public may affect politician evaluations.