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Working hard or hardly working? Gender and voter evaluations of legislator productivity

Working hard or hardly working? Gender and voter evaluations of legislator productivity
Working hard or hardly working? Gender and voter evaluations of legislator productivity

Do women have to work harder in office to be evaluated the same as men? When running for office, studies show that women are, on average, more qualified than men candidates. Once in office, women outperform their men colleagues in sponsoring legislation, securing funding, and in their constituency responsiveness. However, we do not know whether women need to outperform men in their political roles to receive equivalent evaluations. We report on a novel conjoint experiment where we present British voters with paired profiles describing Members of Parliament at the end of their first parliamentary term. Through manipulating the legislative outputs, gender, and party of MPs, we find that voters overall prefer politicians who are productive to politicians who are unproductive, and reward productive politicians in job performance and electability evaluations. However, we find no evidence that productive women are unjustly rewarded, nor do unproductive women face greater punishment than men. Our results suggest that, at least for productivity as measured in parliamentary-based activities, women politicians do not need to work harder than their men colleagues to satisfy voters.

Conjoint experiment, Gender, Legislative politics, Stereotypes, Voting behaviour
0190-9320
Hargrave, Lotte
72c0fc0c-5e34-407a-9e22-b167554c0cdf
Smith, Jessica C.
96f97364-8922-4e62-8581-0d2983052e20
Hargrave, Lotte
72c0fc0c-5e34-407a-9e22-b167554c0cdf
Smith, Jessica C.
96f97364-8922-4e62-8581-0d2983052e20

Hargrave, Lotte and Smith, Jessica C. (2023) Working hard or hardly working? Gender and voter evaluations of legislator productivity. Political Behavior. (doi:10.1007/s11109-022-09853-8).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Do women have to work harder in office to be evaluated the same as men? When running for office, studies show that women are, on average, more qualified than men candidates. Once in office, women outperform their men colleagues in sponsoring legislation, securing funding, and in their constituency responsiveness. However, we do not know whether women need to outperform men in their political roles to receive equivalent evaluations. We report on a novel conjoint experiment where we present British voters with paired profiles describing Members of Parliament at the end of their first parliamentary term. Through manipulating the legislative outputs, gender, and party of MPs, we find that voters overall prefer politicians who are productive to politicians who are unproductive, and reward productive politicians in job performance and electability evaluations. However, we find no evidence that productive women are unjustly rewarded, nor do unproductive women face greater punishment than men. Our results suggest that, at least for productivity as measured in parliamentary-based activities, women politicians do not need to work harder than their men colleagues to satisfy voters.

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Accepted/In Press date: 27 December 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 16 January 2023
Published date: 16 January 2023
Additional Information: Funding Information: We thank Jack Blumenau, Daniel Devine, and attendees at working group seminars at University College London and the PSA Elections, Public Opinion and Parties Conference 2021 for their thoughtful feedback. We also thank Patrick English at YouGov for implementing the survey design. We are very grateful to the PSA Elections, Public Opinion and Parties specialist group for funding this experiment. Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s).
Keywords: Conjoint experiment, Gender, Legislative politics, Stereotypes, Voting behaviour

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 474799
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/474799
ISSN: 0190-9320
PURE UUID: 89b3d7fc-7537-4f9b-91c9-ee014dc4fb9e
ORCID for Jessica C. Smith: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-4909-8884

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Date deposited: 02 Mar 2023 17:52
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:56

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Author: Lotte Hargrave

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