30 Muslims and feelings of non-belonging, experiences with discrimination and feelings of attachment to France, Germany or the Netherlands. In summary, this dissertation aims to understand the complexities of Muslim affinity voting, investigating the multilayered dynamics at play. Gender In this dissertation, I understand gender as whether politicians present themselves as women or men. I ask the classic questions whether there is a “gender affinity effect” (Dolan, 2008) in whether people who identify as woman vote for woman politicians. Individual studies show mixed results. Some researchers find no significant differences (Cargile and Pringle, 2019; Coffé and von Schoultz, 2020; Cowley, 2013: 148) while others find women prefer woman candidates (Brians, 2005; van Erkel, 2019). Some studies show men disfavor woman candidates at the ballot box (De Leeuw, 2017; English et al., 2018: 791; Erzeel and Caluwaerts, 2015; Giger et al., 2014), while others find women disfavor woman candidates (Bauer, 2015; Eggers et al., 2018; Mo, 2015). All in all, a recent meta-analysis pooling the data of 67 experimental studies finds that both men and women prefer woman politicians, but that women prefer woman politicians slightly and significantly more than men do (Schwarz and Coppock, 2022: 9). But, why might there be a “gender affinity effect” (Dolan, 2008)? First, in light of underrepresentation and seeking justice, women may feel better represented by women (Sanbonmatsu, 2002). However, this doesn’t extend to all elections and contexts (Giger et al., 2014), possibly dependent on whether a woman politician competes in elections in which salience is triggered through discussions about the underrepresentation of women (Campbell and Heath, 2017: 227). Women are only more likely to vote for women when they attach importance to descriptive representation of women, which only 9 percent does, explaining why preferences may average out to null-effects in most studies (2017: 227). For instance, in 1992, US elections saw particular salience of female descriptive representation (Zipp and Plutzer, 1996: 52), leading to higher chance of, mostly non-partisan, women to vote for woman politicians. This contingency upon context may also explain the mixed results in the literature. Second, women are seen as better at addressing some political issues than men and vice versa (Holman et al., 2016; Koch, 2016; Lau and Redlawsk, 2001) such as environment, healthcare, and social security, women’s rights, affirmative action, civil rights, the wage gap, and children’s welfare (Schneider and Bos, 2016: 286), all issues that women are more positive about than men (idem). Indeed, negative stereotypes about female politicians are not inherent when voting citizens face a female politician (Bauer, 2015; Campbell and Heath, 2017: 227–228). Negative stereotypes can be triggered in campaigns and therefore depend on the information voting citizens take in, thus clarifying inconsistencies in the literature as well (Bauer, 2015: 704). Women in politics do, however, increase perceived legitimacy in politics (Kao et al., 2023). In
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