“Understanding Implicit and Explicit Voter Gender Biases to Explain the Under-representation of Women in US Politics” (with Cecilia Mo)

Our research program overcomes the social desirability problem in the existing survey-based research and tests whether the prejudice against female candidates revealed in Mo (2015) is nationally prevalent. We do so by incorporating two prominent measures of implicit attitudes-the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Affect Misattribution Procedure (APW)-into a nationally representative survey. The data will be generated through YouGov’s Internet opt-in panel including weights that make the data more nationally representative than other samples. To examine whether the potential gender bias is caused by social identity threat or relative deprivation, we also employ experimental manipulations. Finally, given YouGov’s advanced sampling techniques, we will develop the understanding of potential heterogeneity in voter gender bias by analyzing attitudes within subsets of men and women by party. This research will be among the first to study the prevalence and psychological causes of prejudice against female candidates on a national scale in both an externally and internally valid way.