Double Standards at the Top? Gendered Voter Evaluations of Senior Politicians

Around the world, the gender gap in political representation has narrowed, yet women remain markedly underrepresented in senior political roles, even in some of the most gender-equal contexts. Men have, for instance, accounted for around 90 percent of heads of state or government since 1995 (UNDP, 2023). We theorize that one explanation for why such gaps persist lies in voters’ gendered expectations of how senior politicians should behave, as there is a likely mismatch between the traits voters associate with senior political leadership and the traits women politicians are most often expected and valued to display. Even in contexts where women’s presence has become more common and voters have vivid experience with women in top positions, the mental image of a “senior politician” remains implicitly male. The aim of the paper is thus to test the potential demand-side drivers of why women stop their careers before becoming seniors. In this paper, we test mechanisms that capture how gendered expectations shape voters’ evaluations of political elites. To examine the implications of stereotype mismatch for career progression, we investigate whether voters react negatively when women in senior roles behave in ways that contradict what they are expected and valued to do. While we expect seniority to generally enhance voter evaluations regardless of gender, we argue that senior women will be disproportionately punished relative to their male counterparts when they 1) display stereotypically “masculine” behavior, and 2) show greater independence from party leadership. To test these expectations, we field a pre-registered conjoint experiment on a representative sample of citizens in France, Italy, Norway, and the UK. The profiles vary along four dimensions: gender, parliamentary seniority, degree of alignment with party leadership, and behavioral style associated with stereotypically masculine or feminine norms. The findings advance our understanding of how gendered expectations shape voters’ responses towards elites and contribute to the research on gender and political career advancement.