The Conditional Effect of the Descriptive Representation of Women on Trust in Legislators. A Factorial Experiment on the Role of Partisanship

When and why do we trust politicians? One salient answer to this question focuses on who they are in terms of their social traits. Proponents of descriptive representation stress common social backgrounds in elite-mass interactions as effective means to facilitate generalized (diffuse) evaluative orientations such as trust, particularly among formerly marginalized groups such as women. The study presented in this paper explores this argument on the basis of distinct theoretical and empirical approaches. Theoretically, it advances from a rationalistic conception of political trust. This expects voters to form trust judgements about legislators on the basis of given preferences for responsiveness and in view of informational heuristics (cues) designated to tap into whether their preferences are satisfied. Descriptive cues may be effective in this regard but, nevertheless, competed with other important cues, especially partisanship. Empirically, we explore the relative role of gender in trust judgements vis-a-vis partisanship. We do so on the basis of an original survey experiment with German respondents (N=5.000). We embed this experiment in a small survey designed to tap into the social and political identities of our respondents. In this experiment, we confront respondents with randomized profiles of hypothetical MPs and ask them to register their levels of trust. In this draft, we report preliminary results from a pre-test with 300 respondents. They show that female respondents trust female MPs more, independent of their partisanship. Partisanship, however, constraints the role of descriptive cues in trust judgements in direct and, less so, in indirect ways.