Confident and cautious candidates: Explaining under‐representation of women in Danish municipal politics

Abstract

Why are women under‐represented even in democratic and egalitarian countries? Previous research considers either demand‐side or supply‐side explanations. We integrate both perspectives in a least‐likely case for the under‐representation of women, namely the municipal councils in Denmark. The data stems from a candidate choice conjoint experiment, a survey among potential candidates, and data on the actual pool of nominated candidates. On the voter demand‐side, we show that there is no pro‐male bias in general or in combination with other candidate traits nor that traits evaluated positively by voters appear more frequently among actual male candidates. On the supply‐side, we find that women are less likely to be interested in running for political office. This is primarily because women assess their own political qualifications significantly lower than men. The under‐supply of female candidates seem to drive the disparity suggesting that we should focus more on supply‐side factors to overcome the gender imbalance.

Media Discrimination and Gender Differences in Political Ambition in a Laboratory Experiment

“…Media treatment had no impact on women's agreement with either statement (voting: p-value = 0.189; competency: p-value = 0.686). Participants in this study therefore reflect the gender bias perceptions of women in other European (Dahl and Jacob 2021;Foos and Gilardi 2020) and American (Dolan and Hansen 2018) studies. Clearly, then, women's beliefs about voter gender bias were strong even when media discrimination had not occurred, and counter-discriminatory media did not encourage women to engage in politics.…”

“…Moreover, women often have less money, which is needed to launch a campaign (Williams 2008). However, even studies considering political gender gaps at young ages in relatively gender egalitarian societies like Denmark and Germany (Dahl and Jacob 2021; Pfanzelt and Spies 2019) – where gender socialisation is less severe and before such familial and economic gender differences emerge – find that political gender gaps are significant.…”

“…Secondly, gender salience matters because political ambition may be impacted by the expectation of gender bias. Women’s leadership ambition is decreased when women expect gendered sanctions in the leadership domain (Fisk and Overton 2019), and the perception that gender bias in the political system limits women’s chances of success is widespread (Dolan and Hansen 2018), with women believing their chances are low even in egalitarian countries like Denmark (Dahl and Jacob 2021). Only when gender is observable would women expect others may be biased against them due to their gender, and therefore, women’s political ambition may be lower because of gender salience.…”

Gender bias in political candidate evaluation among voters: The role of party support and political gender attitudes

“…Most studies on the impact of ideology or partisanship on gender bias are located in the two-party system of the US and reveal that Republican voters prefer men candidates while Democratic voters favor women politicians (see for instance Sanbonmatsu, 2002;King and Matland, 2003;Sanbonmatsu and Dolan, 2009;Schwarz and Coppock, 2022). Much less in known about the impact of partisanship on gender bias in the European context, in with the multi-party systems lend themselves for a more detailed differentiation between parties (but see Wilcox, 1991;Saha and Weeks, 2020;Dahl and Nyrup, 2021). Our experiment demonstrates that not all voters show a gender bias, only the voters from the "extreme" parties.…”

“…Wilcox (1991), analyzing Eurobarometer data, showed that right-wing voters have less confidence in women legislators than in men legislators in five out of the eight countries studied. More recently, Dahl and Nyrup (2021) conducted a candidate choice experiment showing that left-wing voters prefer women candidates, while right-wing voters show no gender bias in Denmark. By contrast, Saha and Weeks (2020) did allow more fine-grained differences among parties, and show very little impact of partisanship on gender bias in preferences of candidates in the UK.…”