Experiments as a Method for Learning who Supports Women Candidates and Who Exhibits Traditional Templates that Leaders are Male: Findings from Costa Rica and Israel

Women are breaking glass ceilings in some countries, at least for some types of government posts and in some policy areas. Yet in other countries, particularly for the most powerful posts or in stereotypically masculine policy areas, the ceiling seems to be made of unbreakable concrete. Voters’ attitudes vary about the image of an appropriate candidate for a post, and can help explain women’s increasing access in the top levels of politics, and ongoing barriers faced by women. Traditional templates of leaders are masculine, as throughout history around the world, political, military, and economic leaders have been men. In this paper we use an experiment to explore which types of people hold traditional masculine leadership templates, and who exhibits modern gender-neutral templates about who can be a leader, with DVs for different levels of posts and different policy areas. Our data are from parallel experiments conducted in Costa Rica and Israel with young people (average 18-20 years old), as people of that age group have had maximum opportunity to experience government by women, while the number of women in prominent posts and the political agenda context differ across the two countries. Subjects were randomly assigned to treatments (2x2x2 between groups design; 3 factors: candidate sex, party, whether party is identified; speech with no party label is baseline for measuring response to candidate sex). In this paper we go beyond the main effects of candidate gender, adding post hoc measures of participant SES, attention to politics, ideology, and gender role attitudes to further explore whose leadership templates favor women breaking glass ceilings in politics.