Diverse profiles within single-party cabinets

Naranjo, Gerardo Hernández; Castillo, Jesús Guzmán

doi:10.4324/9781315466491-3

Cited by 15 publications

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The Image of Gender and Political Leadership

2023

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This is the first multi-country, factorial experiment on candidate gender designed to avoid social desirability bias and provide a real-world measure of the importance of gender via direct quantitative contrasts with party effect size (the experimental control, which was statistically significant in all cases). The eight countries: Canada in Alberta and Quebec, Chile, Costa Rica, England, Israel, Sweden, Uruguay, and the United States in California and Texas, are established presidential and parliamentary democracies that jointly offer variance on incorporation of women in government, policy agenda, electoral rules, and party system. Young-adult participants come from highly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in all cases. Political science and psychology literatures are the basis of a multi-dimensional framework about how context molds mental templates of leadership, yielding eleven hypotheses. The 2×2×2 experimental factors, treatments (a lengthy candidate speech with partisan jargon and buzz words), field implementation, and ANOVA techniques used for analysis are outlined in detail. Resident in-country experts who implemented the experiment interpret findings against key country-specific historic and current events in separate country chapters, followed by a chapter providing a meta-analysis of all hypotheses across cases. Though many broad and case specific conclusions can be drawn, the main finding is that traditional leadership images (leaders are men) appear only where defense dominates the political agenda. Otherwise, in diverse contexts, women candidates are accepted as leaders by the participants, indicating young adults’ approval of women’s ability to hold diverse posts, win votes, and manage stereotypically masculine policy areas.

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