Helping the Cause? The Effect of Female Top Candidate Nominations on Voters

What effect does nominating a female top candidate have on voters? Whilenumerous studies investigate the effect of ordinary candidates, it is unclear how thenomination of female leading candidates affects women. We provide the first studythat addresses this question by exploiting the nomination of Annalena Baerbock by theGerman Green Party as the party’s top candidate in the 2021 election. This nominationprovides a unique opportunity to identify the causal effect of a female leading candidateas it was entirely unclear whether Annalena Baerbock or the Greens’ male co-leader,Robert Habeck, would be nominated until the day of the announcement. By leveraginga survey among nearly 70,000 citizens in the field during the nomination, we shed lighton how her nomination affected voters. The results show a positive impact of Baerbock’snomination for the Greens, but among women as well as men. We complement thisanalysis with a survey experiment among 9,000 respondents in Germany to investigatethe underlying causal mechanisms. We find that there is a positive effect of nominatinga female top candidate instead of a man and that these effects are driven by a desire topromote gender equality and by a shared social identity of respondents. Our results haveimportant implications for the debate on gender and politics.