Pascu-Lindner, Andra. “The Effect of Party Leader Gender on Voter Expectations of Cabinet Composition.”

This paper represents the first empirical investigation of the degree to which party leader gender affects voter expectations of future cabinet composition. Preliminary evidence suggests that female-led governments are not perceived as systematically more or less likely to form than their otherwise identical male-led counterparts. Instead, voters rely on cabinet-level variables such as majority status and ideological spread to predict chances of formation success. This finding has important implications for the literature on strategic voting, the scholarship on voter knowledge, and the work on gender and politics.

Under review

Versions of this paper presented at SPSA 2020, Texas Comparative Circle 2020, APSA 2020 

Data collection for this project was supported by a NSF/APSA DDRIG, the Rice University Social Science Research Institute and the Doerr Institute at Rice University 

Pascu-Lindner, Andra, Santoso, Philip Lie. "Measuring Strategic Voting in Denmark: a Direct Method"

Political science scholarship on strategic voting has expanded in recent decades, with evidence for strategic voting in certain segments of the population reported cross-nationally in coalition systems. However, current measurements of strategic voting are not without limitation. This methodological piece uses data from Denmark to measure the level of strategic voting via the direct method, which has emerged as the preferred methodological approach in recent literature, when using individual-level data. As such, the project represents a straight-forward test of the extent to which voters in the Danish 2015 parliamentary election engaged in policy balancing and/or threshold insurance voting. Additionally, it provides a clean measure of strategic voting at the individual level, overcoming methodological challenges noted by previous work.

Versions of this paper presented at SPSA 2021, APSA 2021 

 Schmitt, Elizabeth, Pascu-Lindner, Andra. “Stereotype Reliance in the Context of All-Female Elections”

How do voter evaluations of candidates change given the gender makeup of the election? Existing literature suggests that when candidates present with feminine traits, voters’ reliance on gender stereotypes in their evaluation of the election increases. This has detrimental effects for female candidates, whereas running on feminine issues does not negatively affect male candidates. Less clear is whether these negative impacts for women candidates who present with feminine traits persist in all electoral contexts. This lack of clarity is in part due to limited experimental work that examines how voters evaluate candidates in competition to one another. Our project offers insights on how electoral context and trait-based stereotypes influence how voters evaluate elections. Specifically, we call attention to how voters evaluate elections between two women, and how these elections are fundamentally different from other electoral contexts.

All drafts available upon request. If seeking media comment, please see my WomenAlsoKnowStuff profile for topics that I have expertise in: https://www.womenalsoknowstuff.com/profile/andra-pascu-lindner