Gender stereotypes and citizens' impressions of house candidates' ideological orientations

This research develops and tests hypotheses on the citizen and candidate characteristics that moderate utilization of candidate gender for forming impressions of House candidates' ideological orientations. High candidate visibility-attained through incumbency or campaign expenditures-enhances citizens' categorization of candidates on the basis of gender to infer ideological orientation. The effects of candidate gender are conditioned by political awareness for perception of Republican candidates' ideological positions because citizens receive conflicting cues about their orientations. In contrast, the relatively easy information process task for forming an impression of a Democratic female candidate allows for categorization on the basis of gender to occur among the most and least politically sophisticated. Finally, citizens draw on stereotypes of women to assign attributes to female candidates, not on stereotypes of men to infer attributes of male candidates.