Laszlo Horvath, Susan Banducci, Ekaterina Kolpinskaya (Politics), Samuel Vine (CLES): Stereotype threat effects on women's political engagement

Research on symbolic or non-policy effects of gender-balanced legislatures documented 'role model effects', positively impacting women's political engagement as citizens. Yet most of the evidence relies on observational data making it difficult to disentangle whether gender balanced contexts are also cultures where women are simply more politically engaged. Similarly, little has been proposed as to what psychological mechanisms connect women's minority position in politics to citizen disengagement, and the presence of role models to more political engagement. I am presenting pilot study results of two experiments. Broadly, they propose Stereotype Threat accounting for women's decreased psychological engagement with politics, as well as impaired performance on and confidence about political knowledge tests, under numerical imbalance. The opposite, role model effects, are tested under improved numerical balance setups, ranging from ‘token’ (minimal) presence, ‘critical mass’ presence (roughly a third), and complete parity. The basic, ‘picture treatment design’ is administered on an online sample. Study 2 is a laboratory experiment which further investigates if ST processes still apply if the negative emotion of approach (anger), rather than avoidance (fear), was induced. In an attentional bias paradigm, we expose all subjects to image pairs containing one stereotyping and one non-stereotyping political group. With data collected through an eye-tracking device we are able to establish if subjects approach or avoid stereotyping imagery. We further investigate whether the challenge state reverses ST effects, with greater psychological engagement with politics, and improved performance on the political knowledge test.