Breaking rules and roles

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Maria Zuffova, a Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

Research building on social roles and role congruity theories has shown that because of gender stereotypes, women politicians are evaluated differently from their male colleagues. When women politicians, stereotypically seen as possessing communal traits such as honesty and integrity, violate ethical norms or legal rules, they are more likely to face harsher judgment and punishment than men. However, our understanding of how to mitigate the effects of double standards in the evaluation of female versus male politicians triggered by breaking role expectations remains limited. In this study, we examine this by fielding a survey experiment (n>6,000) in Slovakia, and the US – countries that differ in gender norms, corruption prevalence, and perceptions, yet represent democracies with accountability mechanisms in place. We expose participants to different scenarios in which a male politician comments on a female politician implicated in corrupt behaviour, therreby activating or deactivating stereotypical expectations about gender roles. We expect stereotype deactivation to reduce punitive responses among women and to observe greater egalitarianism among men with daughters, with both effects moderated by education level and field of study. The results show that stereotype activation does not increase punishment in either country. In the United States, treatment effects on attitudinal evaluation of the mayor are null; the only directional movement appears on behavioural punitive inclination, where deactivation marginally reduces the certainty of signing a dismissal petition. In Slovakia, both the activation and deactivation framings produce equally small positive shifts in evaluations, suggesting the presence of a comment rather than its gendered content drives the effect. Respondent gender and parental status do not robustly moderate these effects. Education is the one clear moderator: highly educated US respondents evaluate the mayor's conduct more negatively under stereotype activation.

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