"We Believe You, but Not Her!" Effects of Gender on the Success of Political Explanation Strategies

Politicians use political explanations to underline their position, defend their policy views or argue with political opponents. Ultimately, they employ these explanations strategically to convince their electorates to vote for them. However, research often examines different elements of these strategies, such as blaming or credit claiming, and their success. Less attention has been paid to the effectiveness of different strategies in relation to speakers’ and audience characteristics. Gender is a key characteristic and has been shown to affect forms of representation differently. As such, this paper examines when similar explanation strategies yield different electoral outcomes. And how this effect is moderated by the gender of the politician as well as the voter. Conducting a pre-registered survey experiment of 3,200 respondents in the UK and employing a forced-choice vignette design, we causally test how varying explanation strategies affect vote choice differently based on voters’ own gender and the gender of the politician. We hypothesise that men are less penalised for providing excuses on political issues and that women benefit more from providing justifications when these explanations are perceived as more intelligible.