Gender Stereotyping in the Perception of Political Candidates: Experimental Study on Slovak High-school Students

The issue of gender stereotyping of political candidates have been substantially researched in Western developed democracies (e.g. Sapiro 1982, Huddy and Terkildsen 1993, Kahn 1994, Matland 1994, Aalberg and Jenssen 2007), yet under-researched in the context of new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. Evidence in previous research suggests a certain discrepancy between attitudes toward the equal perception of political candidates‘ competence that are explicitly articulated in surveys and the latent ones examined in experimental research. The purpose of this paper is to confront the existing literature with post-communist context found in Slovakia. The peculiarity of the Slovak post-communist context, where women were portrayed as equal in most areas of social life, and contrasting conservative attitudes present in the Slovak society, presents a puzzle central to this research. Additionally, Slovakia has had a recent experience with the female prime minister as Iveta Radičová served in this position between 2010 and 2012 as the head of a short-lived government. For the analysis of latent gender stereotypes and how these cognitive shortcuts reflect in the perception of political candidates, we conducted an experimental research on 411 students from 6 high schools around Slovakia. The data were collected through questionnaires in which students were exposed to one of two versions of the same political speech including both explicit and implicit information about candidate’s gender, which served as the treatment variable. We proposed three research questions where candidate’s gender was expected to play a role: the first focuses on perception of overall competence of candidate, the second ask whether there are any ‘glass ceilings’ for women candidates with regard to different levels of government and leadership positions, and the last addresses the topic of ‘gendered issue areas’. The data were analyzed using cumulative link mixed models and show mixed support for hypotheses derived from proposed research questions. There is no evidence for an overall difference in the perception of competence of candidates based on their gender; however, women appear to be perceived as less competent for leadership positions, while there is some, yet inconclusive, evidence for ‘gendered issue areas’ hypothesis.