Candidate Traits and Female Electability in Morocco

Extant work has often attributed female underrepresentation in politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to traditional socio-cultural norms that tend to favor male candidates, yet few studies have systematically investigated the structure as well as the impact of such norms on female candidates’ electability. We argue that gender stereotypes play an important role in shaping voters’ attitudes toward female politicians in autocratic settings, primarily due to weak partisan affiliation, the dominance of clientelistic politics, and patriarchal views about the role of women in the public sphere. We test our argument using original data from Morocco (n=900). We conduct a conjoint survey experiment with four paired comparisons of potential candidates and manipulate a number of candidates’ attributes, namely gender, personality traits, connectedness, party affiliation, and previous political experience. Our main outcomes are competency ratings for each candidate profile and which candidate the respondent would prefer to represent their district. We expect that voters are more likely to prefer male candidates over female candidates. We also expect both male and female candidates to be rated more highly when described as having agentic personality traits (i.e., being assertive or ambitious) and as being well connected (i.e., able to provide clientelistic services). However, we expect the gains from being described as having the above characteristics to be larger for female than for male candidates. Finally, we hypothesize that voters prefer candidates who have previously served in government over candidates who have not. Again, we expect the gain from being described as having the above political experience to be larger for female candidates than for male candidates.