Voting for women in nonpartisan and partisan elections

Abstract

Evidence on whether there is a gender affinity effect in US elections is mixed. In this article, we develop a theory of when gender affinity effects will be present and when they will be absent. Crucial to our theory is electoral context. In nonpartisan contexts, we argue that candidate sex serves as a representational cue and will lead to gender affinity effects in vote choice. However, in partisan contexts, all voters will use partisanship as a cue and there will be no evidence of gender affinity effects. We test and find support for our theory using data on vote choice in the 2012 U.S. state supreme court elections and a set of conjoint experiments. Our results have implications for theories of descriptive representation and the design of electoral institutions.