Using gender to choose: voter decision-making in low-information elections

While a growing body of work suggests that voters no longer penalise women at the ballot box in many institutional contexts, less is known about how gender shapes choice when voters have little else to go on. In this paper, we ask how gender is used as a cue in low-information electoral environments, and whether support for women is driven by gender itself or gender-based expectations about what candidates will do in office. To address this question, we field three novel conjoint experiments in Great Britain that vary whether voters are shown politicians’ descriptive characteristics, their policy priorities, or both. We find a substantial preference for women when gender is the only information available, but this preference disappears once voters are given even minimal information about what candidates care about. Our research contributes to ongoing debates about descriptive and substantive representation, showing how the role of gender in vote choice depends on the information voters have available.