Double Standards at the Top? Gendered Voter Evaluations of Senior Politicians

Why do women remain underrepresented in senior political roles, even in political systems where gender equality in candidacies has improved substantially? While existing research increasingly shows that voters do not discriminate against women–and may even prefer them in experimental settings–we know remarkably little about whether these patterns extend to senior women politicians. This project investigates how citizens evaluate long-serving parliamentarians and whether these evaluations are shaped by gendered expectations about different forms of political behavior at the top of the career ladder. 
In this presentation, we introduce the design of a new comparative conjoint experiment to be fielded in France, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The study asks respondents to choose between hypothetical political candidates whose profiles vary along several dimensions, including gender, seniority, behavioral style, alignment with party norms, and policy priorities. By systematically varying these attributes, the experiment enables us to assess not only general preferences for women versus men, but also how voters react to different types of senior politicians. 
Focus of the discussion will be on key design decisions. We will discuss how our design builds on– and seeks to refine– emerging evidence of pro-woman biases in politician’s evaluations, while opening space to understand whether these patterns hold among political elites at the top of their careers.