The Image of Gender and Political Leadership: A Multinational View of Women and Leadership (Oxford, 2023), edited by Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson and Nehemia Geva, provides a comprehensive and engaging comparative study of the extent to which young citizens’ views of political leadership across eight democratic countries is shaped by gender. The central finding of the study is that “Party, not Gender, is the primary driver of young adults’ attitudes towards political candidates. Across diverse policy areas and over different levels of post, in fact, women are viewed as leaders” (229).
This conclusion is based on the work of Taylor-Robinson, Geva, and the 17 authors who conducted experiments assessing “women’s competence to govern” across the following eight countries: Canada, Costa Rica, Chile, England, Israel, Sweden, United States, and Uruguay, with subnational comparison in the United States (California and Texas) and Canada (Alberta and Quebec (229). This methodologically impressive study was designed to probe the relationships between gender and political party to see if voter bias is a factor in women’s continuing underrepresentation in elected and appointed political offices across democratic countries—a deficit that persists despite decades of concerted political action. In particular, the study focuses on the role of “mental templates”—the “think fast” heuristics—employed by citizens when assessing whether a candidate would be a capable leader, particularly in “low-information evaluations of the candidate’s ability” (6–7). The focus on youth probes the question of whether this bias is continuing in new (or soon-to-be) voters.
The first two chapters detail the hypotheses for the cross-national experiment that ultimately surveyed 6,324 young people. All participants were given a partisan speech by a hypothetical candidate and then asked a series of questions about how they rated the candidate’s political abilities, along with questions about the participants’ politics and demographics. In the survey, participants were provided a policy position statement from a hypothetical candidate, which varied according to the candidate’s gender, political party (governing or major opposition), and whether the party label was explicit or not. This produced eight possible statements, one of which was randomly given to participants. The eight countries varied along a number of macro-level factors at the country level that might influence respondents’ perception of women political leaders, including women’s level of representation in legislatures and national cabinet, current or past women national leaders, the national policy agenda, and the electoral design. The research thus examined the interaction between gender, partisan identity, level of government, policy themes, and institutions.
I will focus on the comparative findings since, with such an extensive study, it would be impossible to discuss all of the individual chapter findings in detail. The overall conclusion is that, in almost all cases, party affiliation matters much more than gender. When faced with limited information, participants were much more likely to reach for their knowledge of parties and their partisan identity than for gender stereotypes to assess the leadership of a hypothetical candidate. Across the case studies, the authors found that “gender stereotypes do not restrict women politicians to stereotypically feminine policy areas” even in cases where policy issues were not discussed and gendered mental templates may be more likely (249). Party matters more than gender, especially where key policy issues are “owned” by specific political parties (249). Further, women fit leadership templates across all levels of position (233). There were no consistent differences in the findings between countries with higher or lower levels of women’s political inclusion, development, or between presidential or parliamentary systems.
The few exceptions to the general acceptance of women as political leaders were found in Israel and the two subnational regions of Quebec and Texas. In Israel and Quebec, male candidates were evaluated more positively for level of political office; in Israel, men were favored at all levels of political posts whereas men were preferred only at the level of cabinet minister in Quebec. In terms of policy areas, Israel again was the outlier: respondents showed consistent gendered templates, where men were seen as better leaders in terms of the stereotypically masculine issue areas discussed in the provided statement (defense, foreign relations, internal security) and women were rated more positively on discussed stereotypically feminine areas (education and health). Texas also showed candidate gender to be statistically significant, favoring men on the issue of defense. Interestingly, across all ten cases, women candidates were rated more positively in terms of the undiscussed policy issue of women’s rights.
My summary cannot capture all the nuance of this ambitious and empirically rich collection. One of the strengths of this work is the rigorous methodological design of the experiment and its implementation across all eight countries. This design produced a detailed and careful comparative analysis that required both significant material resources and the dedicated work of authors in each country case study. Complementing this strength is the uniformly high quality of the case studies and the deep country-based knowledge across all chapters. All country chapters provided an in-depth and interesting discussion with fascinating details not fully covered in the comparative concluding chapters—making the individual chapters well worth the reader’s attention. A final strength of the collection is that the study spanned democracies both in the global north and across Latin America, making it a great addition to a literature that has most often focused on the United States or the global north (with important exceptions). Given the level of detail and methodological complexity, Taylor-Robinson and Geva’s discussion of the comparative findings in the last two chapters was particularly accessible and interesting.
Israel is the clear outlier in this study, with the most robust findings that even young people have maintained mental templates that favor male political leaders. In their discussion of the exceptions to their robust finding on the general acceptance of women leaders, Taylor-Robinson and Geva highlight the lower levels of women’s political inclusion in Israel and Texas as a possible explanation, although they note this doesn’t apply to Quebec. They also discuss the importance of security and defense issues in Israel and Texas. Here, I think Taylor-Robinson and Geva missed an opportunity to probe the interaction between levels of religiosity and mental templates of leadership. While the levels of religiosity of the respondents were not asked, and therefore could not be tested within the study, the concluding discussion could have discussed the intersection of politics and religion in these cases. In all three cases, religious identification is politically salient and a marker of political difference. Specifically, in Texas, a conservative evangelical identity is associated with the Republican party; in Quebec, French Canadians adherence to Catholicism is seen as a key cultural difference between Quebec and English-speaking Canada; and in Israel, the Jewish Orthodox population forms a political voting bloc. All three cases thus reflect areas where religious identity is salient to political identity and partisanship and embrace religious ideologies that are particularly hostile to women’s leadership.
Finally, one of the clear findings across all cases was that women political leaders clearly “owned” the issue of women’s rights with young people. The explanation for this might seem fairly obvious—that is, male political leaders have spent little time on this issue while it has galvanized many women political leaders and feminist movements. Recent elections across the globe have pitted explicitly sexist and homophobic politicians against the gains of feminist and sexual minority movements. Thus, the rise of the current illiberal and right-wing politics shows the growing centrality of gender in broader struggles over whether democracies will thrive or fail and would have been an interesting area for a concluding discussion.
Taylor-Robinson, Geva, and the many chapter authors have produced a must-read collection for those interested in understanding and addressing the continuing problem of women’s exclusion from political leadership in democratic countries. Those who employ or are exploring experimental methods and comparative case studies will also be deeply interested in the design of this collection and the great work that went into each chapter. Finally, I would recommend the book for upper-division undergraduate and graduate classes in these areas.
