Voter Bias and the Partisan Gender-Gap in Office

In the United States, women compose a larger share of elected Democrats than of elected Republicans at every level of government. Drawing together literature on the gender-gap in office, on voters’ use of gender stereotypes, and on women’s descriptive representation, we propose a set of hypotheses about the role of voter bias in this partisan disparity. We show that, in addition to the pipeline effects documented in the literature, voters themselves likely contribute to the partisan imbalance of women’s representation in the U.S. Using two implicit mediation experiments, we investigate the mechanism behind the partisan difference in candidate-gender preferences, providing evidence that these biases stem at least in part from stereotype-based inferences about candidate political beliefs. However, even with clear information about which candidate offers greater policy congruence, evidence of gender bias remains among both Democratic and Republican voters.