DIGSSCORE Seminar: Wrongdoing as Career Stoppers in Politics: How Gender and Party Affect Citizen Forgiveness

Ragnhild Muriaas, Professor at the Department of Government, University of Bergen, and Torill Stavenes, Postdoc at the Department of Government, University of Bergen will present for us today. Their presentation is titled "Wrongdoing as Career Stoppers in Politics: How Gender and Party Affect Citizen Forgiveness".

The event is in a hybrid format, you are welcome to join us in the Corner room at DIGSSCORE. Bring your own lunch, we serve coffee, tea and water. Zoom link for digital attendance.

Abstract
Citizens are not always fair when they evaluate politicians’ wrongdoing. They hold some politicians to a higher standard by punishing them more harshly for doing the same mistake as others. Puzzlingly, gender does not work in the same way for all politicians. Indeed, when evaluating what ought to be the consequence of politicians’ wrongdoing for further political career advancements, citizens tolerate more from women on the right than from those on the left. This article proposes a novel answer to this within-gender-gap puzzle which includes an emphasis on partisan bias and party ideology. It uses a survey experiment fielded in gender-egalitarian Norway to show, for the first time, that voters forgive women on the right consistently more than those on the left across five different types of wrongdoing: including fingering with travel expenses, giving friends benefits, insider trading, sexual harassment and spreading false rumors about colleagues. More specifically, the study demonstrates that the effect of politicians’ gender on voters’ readiness to forgive politicians after scandals is motivated by partisanship and ideology combined. Women on the right are evaluated less strictly because co-partisans are more lenient towards their “own” and their opponents supportive of the women’s leadership agenda.