Previous research has shown that expanding the leadership selectorate to include party members and having competitive leadership elections have a number of short-term benefits for a political party (Cozza and Somer-Topcu 2021).
However, while we know that inclusive and competitive selections for party leadership help the party and improve procedural evaluations, we do not know how inclusive and competitive elections affect leader evaluations, and particularly for this paper, how the inclusive election procedure and the competitive leadership elections affect the substantive legitimacy evaluations of women leaders compared to men. We examine the gendered effects of selection details for party leadership with a conjoint experiment in the UK and show that women benefit more from inclusive and competitive leadership elections.
Zeynep Somer-Topcu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include party politics, voter behavior and perceptions, election results, and representation. Her main focus is on Western Europe, though her research often extends to other advanced industrial democracies. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Politics, and Party Politics. She is currently working on a series of projects examining how parties' position-taking strategies and particularly how their election campaign strategies affect voters perceptions of party policies.
Miguel Pereira is an Assistant Professor in European Politics at the LSE European Institute.