Using data from a survey of 200 Moroccan and Algerian parliamentarians, this article assesses the relationship between parliamentarian gender, quotas, and constituency service provision to females. The findings suggest that while electing women increases service provision to females, quotas are needed to create mandates in clientelistic, patriarchal settings, where serving women is a less effective electoral strategy than serving men. Deputies elected through quotas are more responsive to women than members of either sex elected without quotas. The article extends a theory of homosocial capital to explain gender gaps in parliamentarians' supply of and citizens' demand for services. By demonstrating a novel mandate effect and framing mandates in a positive light, the article extends the literature on gender, representation, and clientelism; urges scholars to examine service representation; and supports quotas to promote women's access to services, political participation, and electability.

No abstract

Do voters regard male and female candidates equally? Does apparent religiosity of candidates help or hurt their electoral chances? Where biases exist, what explains them? We present a novel explanation of political bias, drawing from role congruity theory. It posits that political contexts shape citizens' perceptions of qualities that make a “capable leader,” which subsequently drives their willingness to vote for candidates. Evidence from a survey experiment embedded in the 2012 Tunisian Post-Election Survey demonstrates that this theory explains biases based on gender and religiosity better than dominant modernization and social identity theories. Moreover, these mechanisms are also likely to drive political biases related to other features and in other countries. This has important implications for policymakers aiming to reduce political biases in Tunisia, the MENA, or globally. It should encourage them to pay careful attention to stereotyped traits of underrepresented groups and successful leaders, and to use institutional solutions (e.g., electoral quotas) to shape expectations about underrepresented groups and leadership.

No abstract

Few studies examine religiosity-of-interviewer effects, despite recent expansion of surveying in the Muslim world. Using data from a nationallyrepresentative survey of 800 Moroccans conducted in 2007, this study investigates whether and why interviewer religiosity and gender affect responses to religiously-sensitive questions. Interviewer dress affects responses to four of six items, but effects are larger and more consistent for religious respondents, in support of power relations theory. Religious Moroccans provide less pious responses to secular-appearing interviewers, whom they may link to the secular state, and more religious answers to interviewers wearing hijab, in order to safeguard their reputation in a society that values piety. Interviewer traits do not affect the probability of item-missing data. Religiosity-of-interviewer effects depend on interviewer gender for questions about dress choice, a gendered issue closely related to interviewer dress. Interviewer gender and dress should be coded and controlled for to reduce bias and better understand social dynamics.