Room for Snowflakes in Electoral Politics? How Likely Future Candidates’ Perceptions of Harassment in Politics and Attitude Change Differs from Ordinary Citizens’

A key challenge in survey research on harassment, intimidation, and violence directed at political officeholders and candidates is to account for variation in what acts different sociopolitical groups perceive as harassment. When perceptions of harassment vary significantly, including how serious or common harmful acts are, it is hard to gauge the prevalence of negative experiences in politics or understand the democratic implications. This study maps citizens’ evaluations of real harassment stories from Danish politicians and investigates the stories’ effect on citizens’ willingness to run for office, and their conceptions of politics, satisfaction with democracy, and gender equality attitudes. We use an original survey experiment from Denmark with 4,000 nationally representative participants, who are asked to evaluate five harassment stories, selected at random from 100 stories. If knowledge or norms about harassment in politics are lacking, providing episodic information would reduce willingness to run for office and related attitudes about politics. Special attention is paid to variations across age, gender, ideology, and likely future candidacy. If likely future candidates have higher thresholds for viewing incidents as harassment or reacting negatively to harassment stories, we may assume that a ‘toughening’ self-selection process only allows the thick-skinned to survive in politics, which has important implications for descriptive and substantive representation.