Refusing to know a woman’s place: the causes and consequences of rejecting stereotypes of women politicians in the Americas

Abstract

What are the sources and effects of gendered leadership stereotypes for women's representation? We explore the role of stereotypes in shaping public attitudes toward women's representation using AmericasBarometer survey data from 25 countries. We report three key results. First, the modal respondent in almost every country rejects gendered leadership stereotypes, affirming that women and men leaders are equally qualified on corruption and the economy. This holds even after we attempt to account for social desirability bias. Second, there are significant individual-and country-level determinants of stereotyping. In countries with higher women's representation and labor force participation but without gender quotas, citizens are more likely to choose pro-female and neutral responses over pro-male stereotypes. At the individual level, those rejecting stereotypes are less authoritarian, more supportive of labor market equality, and more leftist than those reporting pro-female stereotypes. Third, the consequences for representation vary by partisanship and country context. Pro-female leadership stereotypes boost support for women presidential candidates and for legislative gender quotas, but they matter less among copartisans of women candidates, and they matter more when women candidates are viable but gendered outsiders. Those rejecting leadership stereotypes altogether are less supportive of quotas. ARTICLE HISTORYWhat are the nature and consequences of gendered leadership stereotypes in developing democracies? We address this question in the case of the Americas, where the number of women elected to presidential office has risen dramatically in the past decade, yet women remain substantially underrepresented at all levels. Growing bodies of work examine the institutional causes and policy consequences of women's representation in Latin America; at the mass level, scholars examine public opinion toward women leaders in the abstract, and how candidate gender affects vote choice. Yet, the connection from mass attitudes such as stereotypes to women's representation in the region has yet to be addressed.Scholars of the US show that gendered leadership stereotypes remain prevalent but are declining, and in recent elections only indirectly affect vote choice; some suggest they do not matter at all (Bauer 2015a, 2015b; Brooks 2013; Ditonto, Hamilton, and Redlawsk 2014; Dolan 2014; Dolan and Lynch 2015). We analyze 2012 public opinion data to understand citizens' stereotypes of the political capabilities of men and women politicians. We make two advances over prior work. First, we examine the extent to which developing democracies exhibit similar gendered leadership stereotypes as in the US. There are reasons to expect differences. For instance, the Americas contain a great range in levels of development, and development is associated feminist attitudes more generally (e.g., Banaszak and Plutzer 1993;Inglehart and Norris 2003;Morgan and Buice 2013;Paxton and Hughes 2007). Second, we distinguish theoretically and empiricall...

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