A large body of research suggests that female politicians are subject to gender stereotypes. This research, however, has focused primarily on hypothetical figures who are not well known at all or candidates who are not well known. This paper examines whether such stereotypes apply to women who are extremely well known and the extent to which they are advantaged or disadvantaged by these stereotypes. Drawing on data from elections in nine countries over a 30-year period, this paper investigates what difference the gender of a prime minister makes in parliamentary elections. The findings challenge common gender stereotypes in the literature but nonetheless suggest that the gender of a leader matters to voters and can influence leadership evaluations and vote choice.
Jeffrey Karp is a political scientist specialising in research on public opinion, elections, and political behaviour with over 20 years of experience in survey research. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995. His research addresses questions about how institutions influence political attitudes and behaviour and examines such topics as electoral reform, political mobilisation, gender and political leadership, popular support for direct democracy, and attitudes about European integration. He has published in nearly all of the major international journals in the discipline, including the British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, and Political Psychology. In the late 1990s he served as a co-investigator on the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) to gather data to examine the effects of electoral system change after New Zealand replaced its first past the post (FPP) electoral system with a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system in 1996. Since then he has designed and carried out surveys in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and Australia. He is a member of the advisory board of the British Election Study.