Replication Data for: Are Voters Less Persuaded by Female Than by Male Politicians’ Statements? A Survey Experiment in Japan

We contribute to the demand-side theory of women’s underrepresentation in democracy, by which we mean that women are underrepresented in politics because voters prefer male politicians, by focussing on gender’s effect on the persuasive power of politicians’ policy statements. We conducted a survey experiment in Japan, where women are seriously underrepresented in politics and voter preferences for individual candidates matter with respect to women being elected. We showed participants fictitious local legislators’ policy statements and asked to what extent they supported those statements. We selected foreign and welfare issues on which voters have shared gendered stereotypes and randomly manipulated the legislators’ gender, ideological positions, and tone of their statements. We found no significant differences in approval for policy statements between female and male legislators. This result holds irrespective of legislators’ ideological positions and tone of the statements. We infer from the results of factual manipulation checks that such null results are attributable to the low rate of respondents who recognized the fictitious legislators’ gender. Although our study is preliminary, and its results are ambiguous, our experimental design helps scholars disentangle some mechanisms of voters’ underappreciation of female politicians.