Gender and support for undemocratic politicians

Abstract

Several studies have examined whether attitudinal factors make people more willing to accept political elites violating basic democratic norms. However, the role of more basic socio-demographic characteristics, such as gender, remains underexplored. This may be a mistake, as studies suggest that these influence the evaluation of democratic transgressions. We focus on the role of gender in evaluations of democratic transgressions and re-examine data from two conjoint experiments conducted in Finland. We examine whether the gender of the politician violating democratic norms matters, whether the gender of the person judging the democratic violations matters, and whether it matters for the evaluation of the democratic violation when both the candidate and the respondent are of the same gender. Our results indicate that gender plays at best a limited role, as we find no evidence that candidate gender or the gender of the respondent matters for the evaluations.