Sarah Anzia was quoted in The Atlantic:
To be sure, the recent literature doesn’t show that voters treat male and female candidates identically. As the political scientists Sarah Anzia and Rachel Bernhard wrote in a 2022 paper, “Some voters infer that women candidates are more liberal than men, more compassionate and collaborative, and more competent on certain issues like education.” Anzia and Bernhard’s paper reviewed local-election results and concluded that, on average, women have an advantage over men in city-council elections, but that this advantage declines in mayoral races. Male and female mayoral candidates win at essentially the same rates; however, when the authors compared candidates with similar levels of experience, men pulled ahead, a finding replicated in other studies.
Anzia and Bernhard also found that the more Republicans within a constituency, the greater the disadvantage to women. Schwarz and Coppock identified a similar effect. But are Republicans discriminating against women because they are women, or because they correctly intuit that, on average, women are more liberal than men? Interestingly, this dynamic may be strongest in downballot races—which are more likely to be nonpartisan and may receive little rigorous news coverage. The effects of stereotyping, Anzia and Bernhard wrote, “are largest in elections when voters tend to know less about local candidates.”
The full article is available here.
