SBP: A Cross-National Experimental Study of Attitudes about Women in Government and Leadership.

Texas A&M University, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary This project elucidates factors influencing inclusion of women in government in established democracies like the United States, where women have high levels of education and employment yet continue to hold fewer elected and appointed positions than men. Previous studies have sought to explain differences in representation of women among countries based on electoral institution design, economic development, and culture, but those factors leave much of the variance unexplained. This study collects and interprets new data utilizing a carefully designed experiment to assess perception of women's suitability for specific types of political posts and in different policy areas. The research design also allows findings to be assessed by established theories from psychology explaining attitudes individuals have of political candidates because of existing stereotypes of gender, similarity to oneself, or lack of attributes considered necessary to lead. The study is conducted in eight countries, differing in electoral institutions, national priorities, and prior inclusion of women in government. This set of countries enables comparisons of numerous factors such as candidate's political party and candidate gender, type of post and policy area, prior inclusion of women in key government posts, and voter attributes such as sex, socio-economic status, political ideology, and gender-role attitudes. This study will provide knowledge needed to strengthen democracy throughout the world by enhancing understanding of the challenges for inclusion in government of historically under-represented groups. Technical Summary This project conducts an experiment to collect comparable cross-national data about societal attitudes about the capacity of women, compared to men to govern in varying levels of posts and policy areas. The experiment, which has already been carried out in Costa Rica and Israel, will be replicated in Canada, Chile, England, Sweden, the United States, and Uruguay. These countries are all established democracies, but they vary in inclusion of women in government, institutional rules, and in the centrality of social welfare vs. defense issues on the government's policy agenda. The experiment uses a candidate speech of about 500 words, plus a brief candidate biography as the treatment. In this context the sex of the candidate as well as the party she/he represent are introduced as experimental treatments. We use the effect of the party affiliation of the candidate as means to gauge the magnitude of the impact of gender on candidate evaluations. In each country, the experiment participants will be randomly assigned to a treatment group. After reading the speech, participants complete a questionnaire that ask them to evaluate the candidate for various posts and in diverse policy areas. The questionnaire also contains items about the background of the participant for conducting post hoc analysis to explore whether people from different demographic or ideological backgrounds exhibit different attitudes about the capacity of women and men to be leaders in government. Finally there is a battery of questions for conducting a sex role analysis, also for use in post hoc analysis and cross-national comparison.