Social Desirability in Estimating Support for Women’s Political Rights: Gendered Interviewer Effects Among African Survey Respondents

Public opinion surveys are instrumental to understanding support for women’s political rights. To what extent do influential cross-country surveys suffer from measurement errors stemming from gendered interviewer-respondent effects? We argue that men are more likely to voice male chauvinist attitudes with male interviewers, whereas women could support equal political rights more strongly when interviewed by female enumerators. We also hypothesize that these processes of socially desirable answers will be affected by having one’s spouse present. By analyzing the Afrobarometer survey, we find that men tend to oppose women’s political rights more strongly when interviewed by a man and that women express lower support for women’s rights to male interviewers. Our expectations of interactive spousal effects are found among men: male respondents primarily seem to react differently to male and female interviewers if their wife is absent. Moreover, we explore heterogeneity and report stronger gender-of-interviewer effects among less well-educated individuals.