Women remain underrepresented in political institutions worldwide, including in Germany, where they hold about one third of parliamentary seats despite comprising roughly half of the population. This imbalance not only limits women’s presence but also affects the substantive representation of women’s interests. Gender stereotypes and expectations shape how women politicians’ competence is perceived. Accentuating femininity can provoke backlash, while minimizing it risks perceptions of coldness.
This study presents a pre-test for a larger experimental project investigating how gender-specific self-presentation influences women voters’ perceptions of female politicians’ competence to substantively represent them. Drawing on Pitkin’s concepts of descriptive and substantive representation, homophily theory, and role congruity theory, it develops three hypotheses linking sex, visible stereotypical femininity, and voter identity. It is hypothesized that women candidates receive higher competence ratings than men, while varying degrees of visual femininity may either enhance or reduce these evaluations. Party identification and the strength of female identity may serve as interacting factors.
In this pre-test, 127 women respondents participated in an online vignette experiment, evaluating politicians based on photographs that varied by sex and degree of visible femininity. It demonstrates the methodological validity of visual stimuli while showing room for improvement in the operationalization of femininity and measurement instruments. These adjustments will be implemented in the main experiment with a larger and more heterogenous sample.
Preliminary results reveal three key patterns. First, women politicians were consistently perceived as more competent to represent women’s interests than their male counterpart. Second, differences in visible femininity did not systematically affect competence evaluations, except that neutral presentation led to lower ratings on abortion policy. Third, individual dispositions such as issue attitudes and political identity shaped perceptions, though interaction effects with gender presentation could not be robustly tested.
Overall, the findings validate the general experimental design for the upcoming main study and suggest that sex cues provide women candidates with a baseline advantage, while the impact of gender-specific self-presentation depends on issue salience and context. This pre-test thus contributes to bridging the gap between descriptive and substantive representation research and strengthens the methodological use of visual stimuli in experimental designs.
