Democracy thrives when we applaud our own and accept those we oppose. At the heart of this democratic balance is voters' perceptions of political leaders. Democracy inherently entails that the will of every voter cannot prevail, and elections constantly produce outcomes at odds with some voters' preferences. Voters' reactions in these situations are critical for the democratic process, and leaders who can instill trust across party lines can ease tensions, govern effectively, and ultimately foster democratic stability. Thus, a complete account of democratic processes requires understanding both what makes leaders appealing to their supporters and acceptable to their opponents.
While studies frequently explore gendered biases in vote choice, we know little about how party leaders' gender influences voters' acceptance of political opponents. However, recent findings indicate that voters appreciate female party leaders more but that these warmer feelings do not translate into electoral benefits (Bridgewater & Nagel, 2020; Dassonneville et al., 2021). Furthermore, Adams et al. (2023) demonstrate that parties with a higher proportion of female MPs receive higher ratings from outgroup voters, suggesting that women representatives can reduce hostile affections across party lines.
This paper hypothesizes that female party leaders are more appreciated among outgroup voters due to their perceived warmth. This expectation draws on the literature on evolutionary psychology, social identity, and gender stereotypes and presents a unified theory of how partisan sorting explains voters' double standards in leader evaluations. While positive bias toward ingroup members heightens the importance of assessing leaders' competence, negative bias toward outgroup members increases voters' reliance on warmth judgments to assess leaders' intentions. Since gender stereotypes associate women with communal traits, the paper predicts that voters favor female leaders of outgroup parties for their perceived strengths in warmth-related characteristics.
This study utilizes a combined dataset of party leaders' characteristics and survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) spanning multiple elections across various countries and years. The preliminary results indicate that partisan sorting moderates the effect of gender on leader evaluations. While gender has a negligible impact as a single predictor, its interaction with partisan sorting reveals a double standard that becomes more pronounced with affective polarization. When evaluating outgroup party leaders, voters rate female leaders higher than male leaders, even after controlling for ideological distance and coalition arrangements. Furthermore, as voters become more affectively polarized, the preference for female outgroup leaders becomes more pronounced.
These findings suggest that partisan sorting amplifies gendered leader evaluations and underscores the potential for female leaders to temper partisan hostility. By demonstrating how voters respond differently to male and female leaders across party lines, this study sheds light on the leader characteristics that can bridge partisan divides in polarized democratic landscapes.