Gender and Support for Undemocratic Politicians

Several studies have examined whether attitudinal factors make people morewilling to acceptpolitical elites violating basic democratic norms. However, the role of more basic sociodemographiccharacteristics such as gender remains underexplored. This may be a mistake since studies suggeststhat these influence the evaluation of democratic transgressions. We focus on the role of gender inthe evaluations of democratic transgressions and reexamine data from two conjoint experimentsconducted in Finland. We examine whether the gender of the politician violating the democraticnorms matters; whether the gender of the person judging the democratic violations matters, andwhether it matters when both the candidate and the respondent are of the same gender matter forthe evaluation of the democratic violation. Our results indicate that g ender plays at best a limitedrole, since we find no evidence that candidate gender or the gender of the respondent matters forthe evaluations.