Does the candidate’s sex matter? Yes, but only for some voters

Previous literature has portrayed stereotypes about women as perceptual obstacles female candidate face on the campaign trail, but empirical evidence of gender stereotypes on candidate evaluations is inconclusive. We conducted an experiment embedded in an on-line survey collected in December 2020 with a representative sample of the Spanish population. We test the extent to which there is any kind of unconscious bias against women candidates, and its sources. We find limited evidence of stereotypical attribution of candidates’ traits, and no significant differences in the chances to win the elections that respondents attribute to the female or male candidate. However, confirming the gender affinity hypothesis we also find that participants express a higher chance to vote for the female candidate than for its male counterpart. Why do participants prefer female candidate? Preference for the female candidate is greater among people from the left and this association is conditioned to respondents’ sex: women voters with a leftist ideological self-identification express a higher voting intention for the female candidate, but ideology does not seem to play a prominent difference within men voters