Who's the outsider now? The effects of candidate selection and experience on gendered evaluations of corruptibility

A large body of research has developed arguments why women reduce corruption upon entering public office and why voters’ would stereotype women as less corrupt. One of the arguments most commonly put forward in this literature is that women are outsiders to male-dominated networks, however, we know little about whether voters actually perceive such an outsider status. In this paper, I take a first step at investigating if women are indeed perceived as outsiders and whether the effect of an outsider status can be enhanced or negated by other characteristics of candidates. I argue that primaries, the selection of candidates by all party-members or voters, leads to voters perceiving candidates resulting out of them as outsiders, compared to candidates selected by party elites. This outsider status could benefit women, such that because of the transparent selection method, female candidates are stereotyped as even less corrupt. Second, I develop arguments how, with experience, women and primary candidates lose their outsider status in the eyes of voters and become political insiders that are no longer perceived as less corrupt. I test the theoretical arguments in a conjoint experiment in Spain, where primaries have been used on the subnational level for more than a decade but variation in candidate selection method persists across parties and within parties across regions. The results suggest that women, candidates selected via primaries rather than by party elites and candidates without political experience are consistently evaluated as less corrupt. However, female candidates do not benefit twice from being selected via primaries, thus, their outsider status does not get exacerbated based on selection. While there is some evidence that experience diminishes women’s advantage in being perceived as less corrupt than male candidates, the difference between corruptibility evaluations across genders persists. This indicates that women are more than outsiders in voters’ eyes. Candidates resulting out of primaries are perceived as more likely to be corrupt if they are experienced, thus, suggesting that indeed, primaries’ effect on evaluations of corruptibility is solely based on the political outsider status that candidates receive. This study contributes to several research fields. First, by investigating how women's outsider status might be exacerbated or diminished by candidate selection methods and experience, it contributes to the literature on female representation and specifically stereotyping. Second, it applies the argument that women reduce corruption because they are outsiders from the literature on corruption and female representation to the voters' level, rather than focusing on elite motivations. Third, this article contributes to the growing literature on candidate selections' effects beyond the party. Previous research has largely focused on how candidate selection affects the party -its representativeness, competitiveness, responsiveness and participation rates, but a growing body of literature investigates how candidate selection also affects voters' attitudes and perceptions Finally, this study also contributes to the literature on valence perceptions more generally, by opening new discussions about whether political experience comes with a valence cost in terms of integrity and corruptibility evaluations.