Abstract

Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, but studying how stereotyping affects women’s electoral chances raises a methodological problem: one can either measure stereotyping using surveys and experiments, or one can study outcomes of real elections—but not both. Most existing research does the former. We instead test whether patterns of women’s and men’s win rates in local elections match expectations for how the effects of gender stereotyping should vary: women should fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. Consistent with this, we find that women have a greater advantage in city council than mayoral races, a still greater advantage in school board races, and a decreasing advantage in more conservative constituencies. We also find the effects are largest where voters know less about local candidates. Thus, by studying real elections, we make progress toward understanding how voters affect women’s electoral success.

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