- Was it just Hillary or are voters actually biased against
female presidential candidates?
What about bias against women running for lower office
like, say, governor?
The Elections Research Center at UW-Madison has some answers
after conducting surveys to find out.
Political Science Professor and Director of the Center
Barry Burden is here.
Thanks very much for being here.
- Glad to be here.
- So as to that question,
was it just Hillary or what did your research show
about women running for president?
- It was not just Hillary.
She had some particular attributes that
may have helped or hurt her.
But we found in a national experiment that we did in
a national survey that female presidential candidates suffer
a bias of about two percentage points.
They're likely to get that much less of the vote than men
who are equally qualified.
- And why?
- That we're not quite sure about.
We have some clues by comparing the presidential race
to other offices.
We've done the same experiment for men and women running for
Congress, running for governor, running for state legislature.
We find the bias against women only in the presidential race.
It might be that there are some unique things
about the presidency that make it different.
It's after all is the national office.
It's the commander-in-chief.
It's a role that has a unique place in national security and
foreign policy.
But in our experiments we actually show voters
hypothetical female candidates who are strong in national
security or have hawkish positions on defense and they
are also biased against.
So we think the likely story has more to do with the experience
that people have with women actually in office in Congress,
governorships and state legislature compared to the
presidency, where a voter really has to imagine what would it be
like to have a woman president.
Hasn't happened.
So that causes some uncertainty at least for some voters
and causes them to shy away.
- This is being described as the year of the woman, right,
in congressional races.
Again, as you're saying there's familiarity among voters with
women running for that office.
- That's right.
When we presented voters in our surveys with two congressional
candidates, there was no bias for or against a female
candidate relative to a male.
Actually in state races, in governors races,
in state legislative races, we found that there was a bias in
favor of the female candidate.
So depending on the level of government you're talking about,
how men and women fare differs.
- What is that about,
the bias in favor of female candidates
at the state legislative or gubernatorial level?
- Well, there's one group in particular that moves around
in our surveys depending on the office and that's independents.
In presidential elections, it's actually independents who show
the biggest bias against female candidates.
And we reason it's because they don't have partisanship
as a crutch or cue that they can use
that would guarantee them what the person in office would do.
- Describe that a little bit more.
How does the party affiliation offer what you call insurance?
- Well, party affiliation is the best guide to what
a candidate would do in office.
It's one thing that's actually provided on the ballot
in most cases.
You know whether the person is a D or a R.
Many voters have a sense of being Democrats or Republicans.
If you're a republican and there's a republican candidate
on the ballet, that's the easiest choice to make.
It's a pretty good guide to the hope that candidate
will fulfill the things you'd like them to do.
But for independent voters, they don't have that kind of
insurance as to what a person would do in office
and so they have to rely on other kinds of shortcuts
or what we call heuristics
and the sex or race of the candidate would be one of those.
So it's actually independents who respond most to
a female candidate in a negative way in presidential races,
but actually swing and have the biggest positive response
in gubernatorial and state legislative races.
- What kind of reaction are you getting to this research?
- I think a lot of people are interested
in the Hillary Clinton aspect of it.
She lost the presidential race by-- well, she actually won the
popular vote but lost in a few key states by small amounts.
Our research suggests there's enough bias present
in the electorate that it could have flipped that election.
That said, we do try to control in our study for attitudes
toward Hillary specifically.
And even accounting for that there's still
a bias against a female candidate running for president.
- You talk about these controls you built into your research.
How different were the methods that you used in these surveys
compared to how people have done it previously?
- A lot of previous studies, quite naturally,
looked at real elections.
They'd find contests where a man and a woman had run against one
another and see how they fared over a bunch of races.
But it turns out that's not the right way to do it because the
women who end up running for office are just different from
the men who do and from the women who don't.
Women self-select themselves out of running for office more than
men do.
So the women who show up are often more qualified than the
men they face.
So if we found, for example, in real elections that men and
women fared equally, it might be that the women are actually
better candidates, more qualified,
have more experience but there's a slight bias against them and
those things offset.
So we felt as though we needed to do an experiment
where we presented voters with hypothetical candidates.
We varied their attributes, their age, their background,
their experience and so on, to see the pure effect
of the gender of the candidate.
- Barry Burden, thanks very much.
- Thanks.