The position of women in politics has captured the attention of
scholars for decades. Also today, women continue to face difficulties
when penetrating this male-dominated domain. Gender stereotypes
are one of the factors impeding women’s entrance in politics. By
investigating the conditions under which political gender stereotypes
are activated in voters’ minds, this project moves beyond a
description of the presence of these stereotypes and provides as
such a major contribution to this field of research. Stereotype reliance
is not an automatic process, but rather a contextually dependent
process. A critical implication following from this argument is that
stereotypes can be applied to voters’ evaluation of political
candidates, even when they seem to be absent at first sight.
The impact of three elements of the information environment (that
could activate stereotypes) will be explored: the political context, the
kind of policy issues that are salient and the candidates’ policy
positions. The main research questions will be answered on the basis
of innovative experimental research designs, which allow for more of
the nuance of real-world elections to enter the experimental
environment. Hence, the proposed methodological approach will lead
to a coherent snapshot of the role of gender in voters’ evaluations of
political candidates.