Abstract
We investigated the attitudes of the 11,410 candidates in the Finnish 2017 municipal elections who had responded to a Voting Advice Application. Women candidates were, both in terms of economic and social attitudes, more progressive than men. Building on the gender diagnosticity approach, we used responses to the attitude items to construct a dimensional measure of political genderedness; i.e., a measure of the femininity–masculinity of the individual’s political attitudes. We used this measure to investigate the magnitude of sex differences across parties and the determinants of these differences. Sex differences were larger in parties with more economically right-oriented, socially conservative, well-off, and male candidates. Moreover, these differences were caused by men in these parties being different from other candidates. A similar methodology, in which a continuous measure of genderedness is used to assess sex differences, could be used in other domains of research on political behavior.
Highlights
One of the most accepted generalizations in political science research is that the higher echelons of power are dominated by men
Political Behavior (2021) 43:1779–1800 research, we investigate one way in which this gender imbalance may matter; i.e., we investigate whether the men and women that constitute the political elite differ in their political and policy preferences
We introduce the concept of gender diagnosticity (Lippa and Connelly 1990), which we will employ to measure the genderedness of political attitudes
Summary
One of the most accepted generalizations in political science research is that the higher echelons of power are dominated by men. Our first goal was to investigate, among the 11,410 candidates in the Finnish 2017 municipal elections, whether men and women candidates differed in terms of political attitudes. Women may, for instance, be more socially conservative than men on some issues and more progressive on others This means that employing a composite sum variable of conservativeness would mask the presence of sex differences. Based on the above described rather mixed pattern of results on the effects of sex on the sociopolitical attitudes of the political elite, our first batch of research questions concerns the existence and magnitude of a possible sex gap in the sociopolitical attitudes of the candidates in the 2017 Finnish municipal elections. We will investigate whether other party characteristics; i.e., mean age, income, and education, as well as gender distribution, predict the size of the sex gap
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