How Gender Stereotypes Influence the Impact of State Supreme Court Advertisements

I examine how gender stereotypes influence the campaign advertisements utilized by candidates for state supreme court and how these gender stereotypes influence how voters react to these advertisements. Gender stereotypes have been found to have a profound impact in races for other offices (e.g., legislative, executive), but there is a lack of research on the role of gender stereotypes in state court elections. In my present research, I first conduct a content analysis of state supreme court advertisements over the course of four election years, looking specifically at how the candidates describe themselves in their advertisements. Based on these findings, I create advertisement scripts where I vary the gender of the candidate and the type of message employed by the candidate in order to test how the gender of the candidate and the content of the messages influences voter impressions of judicial candidates. In a second experiment, I create video advertisements based on these scripts and test how the video advertisements, as well as the candidate’s gender, affect impressions of these candidates. My analyses indicate that not only gender stereotypes play a role in the way judicial candidates create their advertisements, but they also impact the way voters form opinions about candidates running in judicial races.