Women and Left-Wing Citizens Prefer Women Candidates: Testing Consistency and Psychological Processes Across Twenty Diverse Countries

Abstract Across the world, women remain underrepresented in politics. Yet, recent experimental studies of candidate preferences find that citizens favor women over men candidates, with women and left-wing citizens driving aggregate preferences. This raises both theoretical and empirical puzzles. Theoretically, the underlying processes producing heterogeneous preferences across citizens’ gender and ideology remain unaddressed, and empirically, conclusions rest primarily on data from the United States and Western Europe, which raises questions about generalizability to democracies in the Global South and other regions. This article reports the results from the most comprehensive and geographically diverse test of citizens’ preferences for women candidates to date. We fielded a conjoint candidate choice experiment with a multitude of respondent-level predispositions (e.g., gender, ideology, sexism, and gender typicality) across twenty institutionally, culturally, and economically diverse democracies (N = 14,369). The results advance knowledge about citizens’ preferences for women candidates both empirically and theoretically. On average, women candidates are preferred by three percentage points, and this advantage is statistically significant in fourteen countries. Women—especially those identifying as more gender typical—and left-wing citizens—especially individuals low in social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, and hostile sexism—display particularly strong preferences for women candidates. These results are discussed with respect to their theoretical and practical implications for women’s political representation.