Women in conservative parties are doubly disadvantaged in politics, having to balance the gender role-incongruent behavior of engaging in politics with an ideological commitment to traditional gender roles. This paper argues that conservative women employ exaggerated femininity in appearance as a counterweight to the dominance penalty they incur when seeking power within the highly patriarchal institution of a conservative party. This framework advances research on gender in political institutions in three ways. First, it distinguishes appearance and behavior as separate dimensions of gender performance. Whereas most scholarship on gender and politics focuses on how women balance communal versus agentic behavior, I argue that appearance functions as a compensatory tool: conservative women can pursue hierarchy-challenging behaviors while offsetting those risks by visibly overperforming femininity. Second, it situates this pattern within the longer history of women on the right: conservative women across time and place have strategically drawn on hyper-feminine presentation to navigate patriarchal constraints. Third, it highlights partisan asymmetries in institutional incentives: women in egalitarian parties face fewer incentives to adopt hyper-feminine appearance, whereas women in conservative parties deploy it as a tool to reconcile ambition with ideological traditionalism. Empirically, I examine what has been popularly termed “Mar-a-Lago face” in American politics, referring to the exaggerated cosmetic presentation of Republican women associated with Donald Trump. Using experimental manipulations of facial femininity and candidate behavior, I test whether hyper-feminine presentation mitigates penalties for agentic behavior among Republican (but not Democratic) voters, and complement these causal tests with observational analysis of real candidate outcomes. Drawing from literatures on gender roles, the politics of appearance, and partisanship, this project offers a novel theoretical account of partisan and ideological differences in gender performance. Given the persistent underrepresentation of conservative women relative to liberal women cross-nationally, this project has far-reaching implications for understanding representation in right-wing parties.
