Do voters perceive women candidates of the far right as more democratic and socially acceptable than men candidates of the far right? If so, far-right parties may strategically use women candidates to appear more democratic and socially acceptable in the eyes of voters, thereby reducing the social stigma they face. Building on the literature on gender stereotypes and candidates, we theorise that voters perceive women far-right candidates as more cooperative, empathetic, respectful of rules and moderate – and therefore, more socially acceptable and more likely to behave in line with democratic principles – than men far-right candidates. This should be the case even when candidates explicitly favour positions that strongly break with the principles of liberal and electoral democracy. To test our hypotheses, we run an original online vignette survey experiment in Germany (N = 3,500), where the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland is still relatively stigmatised compared to its counterparts in other European countries. Our findings bring a novel gender perspective to the literature on far-right normalisation, providing insights into the extent to which women are contributing to legitimising and normalising far-right parties.
