(How) Do Voters Discriminate Against Women Candidates? Experimental and Qualitative Evidence From Malawi

Abstract

How do voters evaluate women candidates in places where traditional gender norms are strong? We conduct a survey experiment in Malawi to assess both whether citizens discriminate against women candidates and how other salient candidate characteristics—political experience, family status, policy focus, and gendered kinship practices—interact with candidate gender to affect citizen support. Contrary to our expectations, we find citizens prefer women candidates ceteris paribus, and women and men with the same traits are evaluated similarly. Yet, we find two unexpected ways women candidates are disadvantaged in the electoral process. First, we find that citizens prefer candidates who are married with young children, a profile much more common among men than women candidates in practice. Second, we find pervasive qualitative reports of negative campaigning that likely affected citizens’ evaluations of actual women candidates, while not affecting evaluations of hypothetical candidates. We discuss how our results speak to the ways gender biases operate in practice across political contexts.

The Ties That Double Bind: Social Roles and Women's Underrepresentation in Politics

“…As Gimenez et al (2017) show, even in the relatively low-stakes election of state-level party caucus members, and even among Republicans who place greater emphasis on women's roles as mothers and caregivers, women are more likely to get elected if they are highly successful at both career and family. These findings are mirrored in other recent experimental work in Malawi which shows a preference for married women with children over other types of candidate backgrounds (Clayton et al 2017). The double bind is also evident in public opinion research that uncovered Latin Americans’ heightened support for “supermadres” (e.g., Schwindt-Bayer 2010, 25).…”

“…To the degree that voters tend to choose representatives who have traditional family structures, women bear the burden to convince the public that they can do both jobs well. In other words, female candidates have to be superwomen while male candidates enjoy the luxury of delegating family work to others (Gimenez et al 2017; Clayton et al 2017; Schwindt-Bayer 2010). In practice, this means that bias aginst women in politics can exist even though people evaluate candidate qualifications similarly across the sexes.…”

Gender and Dynastic Political Selection

“…In addition to this kind of screening discrimination, the underestimation of women’s qualifications could also stem from taste-based discrimination or negative stereotypes. A considerable body of research shows that many voters hold a negative view of women as candidates (e.g., Huddy and Terkildsen, 1993; McDermott, 1997), although recent research based on survey experiments suggests that voters in many contexts might no longer hold such discriminatory views (e.g., Clayton et al, 2020; Teele et al, 2018). 8 In the presence of such gender discrimination, women may need to be more qualified and work harder at constituency work than their male counterparts in order to reach the same level of support from voters and parties, at least until they have a chance to prove their true quality (e.g., Anzia and Berry, 2011; Barnes et al, 2017; Folke and Rickne, 2016; Fulton, 2012; Horiuchi et al, 2020).…”

Gender-Equality Concerns and Political Attitudes toward Women in the 2019 Legislative Election: Evidence from Pelalawan

“…The degree of electoral support for women's political candidacies is also affected by political values evolved in society (Barnes & Córdova, 2016). Features which give unique characteristics for candidates -political experience, family status, policy focus and gendered kinship -are useful tools to measure the level of gender bias among voters (Clayton et al, 2019). Moreover, certain attributes of countries such as development, religious belief, legacy of previous regime, and the extent of democracy, have influence on citizens' perception on women's ability to govern (Alexander, 2012).…”