Projects

This paper examines whether voters extend gendered assumptions about issue competence to lesbian and gay candidates. Research on gender and politics shows that women are often viewed as stronger on issues such as education and healthcare, while men are associated with defense and foreign affairs. I ask whether similar patterns apply to sexual minority candidates. Drawing on theories of implicit inversion and role congruity, I theorize that voters may perceive gay men as more competent on traditionally feminine issues and lesbians as more competent on traditionally masculine ones. I also test whether these perceptions shift when candidates are described with explicitly masculine or feminine traits, and whether they vary across partisan and gender subgroups. 

Using two conjoint experiments with U.S. adults, I find that voters do not apply these stereotypes in the way the theory predicts. Rather than producing issue-specific advantages, sexual orientation generates a broad penalty: lesbian and gay candidates are rated as less competent across seven policy domains and are less likely to be chosen as vote, donation, or winning candidates. These effects are not moderated by gendered trait cues. The penalty is also highly partisan, with Republican and conservative respondents driving most of the negative evaluations, while Democrats show little evidence of personal bias even as they anticipate electoral disadvantages for sexual minority candidates. This manuscript is currently under review.