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

A common argument in the literature on corruption and female representation is that voters stereotype women as less corrupt and that women should reduce corruption as outsiders to corrupt networks. However, most of these studies study gender in isolation of other factors, and little is known about whether the perception of women as outsiders can be exacerbated or negated by other characteristics of candidates. In this article, I argue that candidate selection and experience can affect corruption evaluations of female candidates, such that primaries, as an outsider-producing candidate selection method should exacerbate women’s outsider status and lead to lower corruption perceptions, while experience should signal a political insider status to voters, negating lower corruptibility evaluations. Using a conjoint experiment in Spain, my results suggest that candidate selection does not affect corruptibility evaluations of female candidates in either direction, and experience only slightly increases corruptibility evaluations of women. This indicates that women benefit from more than an outsider status when it comes to corruptibility evaluations. Candidates resulting out of primaries in general however are perceived as more likely to be corrupt if they are experienced, suggesting that, primaries’ effect on evaluations of corruptibility is solely based on the political outsider status of primary candidates.