Voting for a woman: ideology and gendered candidate choice in Finland

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the literature on gendered candidate choice by investigating how voters’ ideological positions on both the socioeconomic left–right and the cultural GAL–TAN dimensions are associated with support for women candidates, and how these associations play out among women and men voters. The study is situated in the open-list proportional electoral system (OLPR) of Finland, where voters are obliged to cast a vote for a single candidate from a large selection of nominees and where women have a strong presence in the political sphere. We use unique data on voters’ self-reported candidate choice from two Finnish post-election studies in 2011 and 2019. The results show that a majority of both men and women voters tend to engage in same-gender voting, meaning that women voters are more inclined to cast a vote for women candidate than men voters are. We further show that the two ideological dimensions have different connections for men and women voters. While women voters’ propensity to support women candidates is connected to their position on the left–right dimension, but not to the GAL–TAN dimension, the opposite holds for men voters.