Gendered Expectations: Do Voters Reward Women for Supporting Women’s Interests?

Are women legislators punished for not supporting women’s substantive policy interests? We test these gendered expectations. We marshal an original content analysis of cable news coverage and two survey experiments testing voters’ assessment of hypothetical legislators on the issues of abortion and equal pay. We find that voters rate both women and men legislators positively for supporting women’s issues and negatively evaluate legislators of both genders when they do not support women’s interests. We also find that women voters negatively evaluate women legislators who act against women’s interests at a greater rate than men voters. While we do not find evidence of voters holding women legislators to gendered expectations, we do find that legislators, regardless of their gender, have strategic incentives to promote women’s substantive representation. Our results suggest that voters care more about the substantive representation of women’s political interests than who supports those interests.