Still Not Equal: Heuristics and Gender Stereotyping in American Elections

Research on gender in politics has long emphasized the gender gap—the number or proportion of women in office—as its chosen measure of women’s attainment. When women win elections at rates equal to men, as they do in the U.S., many scholars thus conclude that candidate sex must play little or no role in voters’ decisions. Yet the question of which women win should interest scholars of gender as much as how many women win—and tells us a great deal more about how politics is gendered. How then does candidate gender enter into voters’ decisions? Modern theories of voting behavior, observing that acquiring information about candidates is costly, often conclude that supplying voters with more information about the candidates would obviate reliance on cognitive shortcuts with known biases. This dissertation stakes a different claim: while heuristics and stereotypes do enable voters to “fill in” incomplete information, they also allow voters to simplify overwhelming information. Gender, as one of the simplest and most ubiquitous organizing principles of human behavior, helps us address the difficult task of voting in a candidate-centered electoral system by reducing a multidimensional task to a simple set of guidelines. This ensures biases in how we vote not only in low-information settings, but in high-information settings as well.In this dissertation, I use experiments and election data to test whether our decision-making process affects the descriptive representation of women in the U.S. I present evidence that voter reliance on gender as a cue affects the type of women elected at every level of office. In Chapter 1, I examine state legislative elections in Oregon and find that voters winnow the field by selecting women with attractive, stereotype-congruent appearances, even though voters have a great deal of information and partisan cues in such races. In Chapter 2, I show that in local elections in California, where voters often know little about candidates, women fare better when they run for offices that fit feminine stereotypes (city council and school board) and worse in stereotype-incongruent offices (mayor). In Chapter 3, I show that even in high-information and high-salience national elections, partisan voters feel more favorable towards women who exhibit gendered leadership styles congruent with their party’s preferences: feminine for Democrats, masculine for Republicans. The familiarity and simplicity of gender as an organizing principle suggests the use of gendered heuristics and stereotypes is inherent to any political system in which voters evaluate individual candidates. This holds whether voters have a great deal of information about candidates or only a little, in elections of high- and low-salience, and across both partisan and non-partisan races. Even when women win elections at rates equal to men, women who run counter to stereotype—in appearance, in office type, in party—are at a disadvantage compared to women who fit stereotypes