Experimental Tests of an Attitudinal Theory of the Gender Gap in Voting

This research examined an attitudinal explanation of the gender gap, by which differences in the attitudes that men and women hold on social and political issues and in the positions that candidates take on these issues can produce gender gaps in voting. Two experiments portraying a hypothetical candidate for congressional representative, one conducted with students and the other with people sampled at a metropolitan airport, pro-duced the predicted attitudinal gender congeniality effect on voting: Participants of each sex reported greater likelihood, com-pared with participants of the other sex, of voting for the candi-date who endorsed positions typically favored more by their own sex than the other sex. This attitudinal gender congeniality effect appeared to be mediated in part by perceptions of candidates' political effectiveness.