While public opinion suggests higher levels of egalitarian gender attitudes toward women in politics, research shows that sexism and stereotypes structure women’s opportunities in electoral politics. For example, in Canada, those reporting high levels of explicit sexism significantly prefer agentic men over similarly agentic women as candidates. Furthermore, Canada’s multiparty context shows how these attitudes are unevenly distributed across partisans, with sexist attitudes being less prevalent amongst centrist and leftist parties. Thus, differences in descriptive representation of women between parties can be attributed, in part, to both party recruitment strategies and the political attitudes and behaviour of party members.
Yet, little is known about how sexism and partisanship interact in this context with other factors such as race and ethnicity. This study addresses this gap by replicating and extending previous findings to assess how gender and race interact to affect how agentic candidates are evaluated. Drawing on data from an original survey experiment, race is operationalized using vignette profiles of white and South Asian candidates. In addition to sexism, a series of out-group hostility measures are used to assess how and for whom racist and sexist attitudes affect women’s opportunities in electoral politics.
