7/22/2019 Putting Scandinavian Equality to the Test: An Experimental Evaluation of Gender Stereotyping of Political Candidat

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Putting Scandinavian Equality to the Test: An Experimental Evaluation of

Gender Stereotyping of Political Candidates in a Sample of Norwegian Voters

By Richard E. Matland

The author used as analysis methods the experiment and observation. The purpose of the analysis

is to test the equality of men and women candidates in elections and the bias to elect women in

Scandinavian countries. Methods used are relevant for the analysis purpose, in order to test the

hypotheses according which there are no policy areas in which gender bias offer an advantage to

either women or men candidates. The author used an experiment to test the gender equality in

policy areas, in which neither men nor women are perceived as superior. The information

amount gathered dismantles the hypothesis of the researcher. The experiment results showed thatwomen are favored regarding competency competent in education and health policies and less

favored in policies as economy and defense. The great number of female representatives in

Scandinavian countries politics seems to be more related to the political culture and less to

perception of equality in competency.

The results of the experiment show that the party orientation of the voters can influence their

opinion regarding women competency, both negative or positive in some policy areas, based on

stereotypes, according which women are more competent in caring (education, health) and less

competent in economic and defense. Voters bias can be also expressed by the candidate political

orientation (Labor and Conservative in this case).

In my opinion the data clearly show the existence gender schemata, according which voters are

classifying candidates according to their assumed competency in some policy areas. The

analysis design was appropriate, because the researcher used the same speeches with different

name, in order to clearly show that gender bias is present in voters behavior in Scandinavian

countries. Further, the researcher demonstrates that voters are inclined to categorize candidates

competency according to their gender. As the author stated in conclusions, further testing should

be done in order to analyses other samples for increasing the quality of the research.