Do Gender Stereotypes Transcend Party?
Abstract
Voters hold stereotypes about candidate gender and candidate party. Yet little is known about the intersection of gender and party stereotypes. In this article, we investigate whether gender stereotypes transcend party. We consider whether gender stereotypes affect woman politicians differently by party and examine the effect of partisan identification on gender stereotypes. We find that the public perceives gender differences within both political parties. Thus the presence of the party cue does not preclude a role for candidate gender. However, we also find that the implications of gender stereotypes are somewhat different for Democratic and Republican women.
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1.
1. The 2006 American National Election Studies (ANES) Pilot Study full release (dataset), produced and distributed by Stanford University and the University of Michigan. The 2006 ANES Pilot Study consists of 675 telephone interviews conducted between November 13, 2006, and January 7, 2007. The pilot study reinterviewed respondents from the 2004 ANES time series study. The reinterview rate was 56.3 percent. A weight variable is used to take into account sampling and poststratification factors. This variable also takes into account 2006 nonresponse based on age and educational attainment. We merge the pilot data with the 2004 ANES time series study to gain additional variables for our analysis. See http://www.electionstudies.org.
2.
2. Please see the appendix for a list of variable numbers.
3.
3. The party versions of the stereotype items are positively correlated: r = .58 for education, r = .47 for crime, and r = .45 for abortion.
4.
4. The political knowledge questions asked the respondent to identify the job or political office held by four political figures: Dennis Hastert, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, and William Rehnquist. We acknowledge the recent report from the ANES titled “Problems with the ANES Questions Measuring Political Knowledge,” which urges caution in the use of these questions from 2004 (see http://www.electionstudies.org/announce/newsltr/20080324Politica lKnowledgeMemo.pdf).
5.
5. However, if the respondent’s abortion position is excluded, political knowledge predicts the Republican stereotype on abortion.
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Article first published online: October 2, 2008
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