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The literature largely assumes that a candidate’s religious affiliation sends signals about his or her ideological leanings and policy preferences. We contend that prior works have not sufficiently accounted for the effects of the party label. Using an original experimental design that manipulates both religion and party, we show that the effects of a religious cue are more limited than previously implied. Though Evangelical and Catholic cues do impact impressions of a candidate’s stance on abortion, the partisan cue dominates perceptions of overall ideology. These findings further demonstrate the power of the party brand and are more consistent with research arguing for the non-policy value of the religion heuristic.

Widely held gender stereotypes present obstacles for women experts, who are generally evaluated less positively than equally qualified men across a range of fields. While audiences may view women as better equipped to handle certain feminine-stereotyped issues, Role Congruency Theory suggests that expert authority in politics may be incongruent with traditional feminine gender roles, leading to a subsequent backlash. Building upon the latter theory, I hypothesize that when cued to consider the expertise of a news source, the (in)congruence of gender-stereotyped roles will activate gender biases which increase the gap in evaluations and trust of women and men. Using selection experiments, I assess the relationship between domain-relevant expertise and gender biases across a range of gender-stereotyped issues. I find that women experts are rewarded less for additional expertise and punished more severely for a lack of expertise, exacerbating gender-based biases relative to the control. I find that this pattern is consistent across both masculine- and feminine-stereotyped issues, including issues that disproportionately impact women, such as women’s health care and the gender wage gap. The addition of competing partisan cues, however, overwhelms the influence of gender. The normative implications suggest women in the media often face an uphill battle to advocate for their interests on key issues that affect them even when they may have more direct relevant experience in addition to their qualifications.