Chemical castration as gender justice: How punitive attitudes inform gender policy preferences and voting behavior among Brazilian women

Currently, 19% of the women in the Brazilian Congress are part of Bolsonaro’s party, known for its anti-feminist and pro-punishment stances. At first, this fact seems to contradict expectations based on substantive representation. This concept would predict that women share similar interests and therefore would want to advance similar gender policies once in power. I argue that this apparent contradiction can be better explained by exploring how gender, along with punishment attitudes, interacts with voting choices, a current gap in the literature. This project aims to fill this gap. Specifically, it answers the question: “How do attitudes towards punishment impact the gender policy preferences and voting behavior of Brazilian women?”. This mixed-methods study works with a novel data set of 39 interviews and 1,194 observations from an online survey experiment. This qualitative data was coded in 2 passes, using deductive, grounded and in vivo codes, with the support of NVivo, followed by analytic memoing. The quantitative data includes results from a conjoint experiment and a survey experiment, which were analyzed, respectively, through average marginal component effect analysis and logistic regressions. The main findings of this thesis indicate that Brazilian women mostly have progressive views on gender issues and there is high demand for gender policy among all women. However, the content of the policies prioritized by them vary when voting, with a particular division of women across issues of gender punishment and abortion, which are mostly defined across partisan lines. This study aims to contribute to the literature on gender and punitive attitudes and substantive representation. Furthermore, through its survey gathering substantive data on policy preferences in Latin America, this project addresses a key challenge to research so far, namely the lack of data on these preferences.