An Examination of the Role of Gender in Voter Perceptions of British Political Leadership: An Experimental Approach

Party leaders (and prime ministers) are not directly elected in the UK system, however party leadership elections are about selling oneself to a certain part of the electorate (party members) and wider public perceptions of leaders are increasingly important in British politics. Previous experimental findings from mainly US-based literature has suggested that gender-based stereotypes applied by voters can penalise women seeking leadership positions and that political leadership is a highly gendered environment. Yet, these low-information experiments have been challenged by recent US data that suggests women are not systematically discriminated against at the ballot box. By designing an experiment in a more high-information environment this paper allows the researcher to explore the gap between these findings. Drawing on the emerging field of political psychology, this paper sets out to examine the extent to which voter perceptions of political leadership are gendered in Britain. The proposed experiment is a mixed factorial design with sex of the leader a within-subject factor and information received between-subjects factor. Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) software is used to create a more high-information environment.  DPTE software is an internet-based programme which allows the researcher to design a dynamic social environment, such as an election. It reflects the flow of information received during a campaign where an ever-changing subset of the overall information is available at any one point in time. Through this software an artificial party leadership election is created to explore the effect varying candidate sex has on voter evaluations of leadership candidates and the information sought out about these leaders; and secondly, the effect of gendered information such as gendered news coverage. This research offers a fruitful new method for gender and leadership research in the UK.