When a woman asks to be voted to a sexist constituency: was Giorgia Meloni’s gender an advantage, a disadvantage or an irrelevant factor in the 2022 Italian general election?

Abstract

In this study, we investigated whether Giorgia Meloni’s gender was an advantage, a disadvantage or an irrelevant factor in the 2022 Italian general election. Using datasets from two election surveys conducted with two quota samples of the adult Italian population, Ns = 1,572 (ITANES dataset) and 1,150 (COCO dataset), we predicted the vote in the election as a function of participants’ gender, beliefs about gender and their interaction, controlling for the key sociodemographic and political variables. Two multinomial logistic regression revealed that gender and beliefs about gender were neither additively nor multiplicatively associated with the vote. We therefore conclude that Meloni’s gender did not affect the outcome of the 2022 Italian general election.