Abstract Given that parliamentary democracies channel the preferences of their citizens through elected representatives, parliamentarians need to estimate the policy preferences of their electorate. We investigate how the gender of representatives influences this assessment for policies characterized as women’s issues. Building on theories of shared group experiences, gendered role expectations, and strategic behavior, we expect that, in comparison to their men colleagues, women representatives are better at estimating their party voters’ policy position when they are electorally vulnerable. Combining original survey data from political elites and voters in Germany and Switzerland, our estimation indicates that women representatives’ estimation of public opinion on women’s issues is not more accurate than that of their men colleagues. Yet, the perceptual accuracy of women representatives increases markedly if they are electorally vulnerable. Corroborating our theoretical expectations, a placebo test implies that our findings are specific to women’s issues.
Höhmann et al. (Mon,) studied this question.