Citizen responses to female executives: is it sex, novelty or both?

ABSTRACTWomen increasingly have been elected to executive office – both at the national and subnational level – in countries throughout the world. Yet, we know little about the effects that the election of a woman to executive office has on citizen attitudes, political engagement, or political participation. In this paper, we argue that the election of a woman to an executive could have effects through the presence of a woman in the executive, the novelty of a woman assuming executive office, or both. We test these hypotheses with a survey experiment conducted in Brazil that focuses on the election of a hypothetical female governor. This project sheds light on how citizens respond to female executives with a causal analysis in an important region for gender and executive politics.