Does the Context Matter for Political Gender Stereotypes as a Source of Voter Bias? An Experimental Study in Flanders (Belgium) and Slovakia.

Women continue to be underrepresented in parliaments across the globe. This paper focuses on the role of voters in this phenomenon by looking at gender stereotypes as a source of voter bias. The bulk of research on political gender stereotypes indicates that women are in general considered as being less competent and more leftist than their male counterparts (e.g. Sapiro, 1981; Koch, 1999; Huddy & Terkildsen, 1993; Dolan, 2014). Research exploring gender stereotypes has been primarily conducted in the United States or in developed countries in Western Europe and Scandinavia. However, gender stereotypes are conditional upon the political context. Voters’ views on female candidates might change as they become more familiar with female politicians entering parliament and government over time. This illustrates the necessity to conduct studies on the prevalence of political gender stereotypes in different contexts and settings. Countries of post-communist Europe have been systematically underexplored although they represent an interesting case for comparison. In this paper, we examine the conditionality of gender stereotypes upon the political context using an experimental design in Flanders and Slovakia. These contexts differ in several important respects, such as the electoral system design (e.g. the use of electoral gender quotas), the share of elected women (38% compared to 20%), the share of women in leadership positions and the general (political) culture. The role of women in post-communist countries was (is) different than in other countries. In the discourse, women have been portrayed as equal to men, yet women were forced out of the workforce and into traditional women roles (e.g. Havelková 2017). The exact same experimental research design was applied in both Flanders and Slovakia. Based on samples of similar sizes in both countries, we analyze the presence of stereotyped patterns in voters’ perceptions of political candidates with a special focus on perceived competence, perceived ideological positioning, and perceived leadership abilities. With this innovative comparative design we aim to provide more insights on the role of political, societal, and cultural contextual factors on the development, and impact, of gendered attitudes among voters. By contributing to the knowledge about factors influencing discrepancies in gender representation, this paper comes to the heart of what the proposed panel on women’s discrimination at the polls aims to do.