Madame Justice Will Save Our Democracy: Gender Bias and Perceptions of the High Court in Transitional Regimes

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231169712
• Author: Christopher Shortell,Melody E. Valdini
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(4) 1619–1631

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231169712

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Madame Justice Will Save Our Democracy:

Gender Bias and Perceptions of the High

Court in Transitional Regimes

Christopher Shortell

1

and Melody E. Valdini

1



Abstract

While existing literature has established that women leaders are stereotyped as more likely to uphold the norms of

democracy, the power of this effect in the non-democratic context is not established. We address this gap and argue that

the context of regime transition cultivates a unique dynamic in which the stereotypes associated with women justices

become especially valuable to both citizens and the state. However, we argue that this perception of women contributing

to the health of democracy is not constant across all citizens equally; instead, those people with high levels of hostile bias

against women are more likely to view women as the potential saviors of the democracy. To test our theories, we offer

original survey data from Thailand and Poland, two countries in the midst of regime transition. We f‌ind evidence that

suggests that the impact of women justices on assessments of democratic health is indeed dependent on hostile bias in

Thailand, but that the relationship is not found in Poland. Our results suggest that bias can sometimes operate in

unexpected ways, and that scholars should consider multiple measures of different types of bias when investigating its

effects on behavior.

Keywords

gender, courts, bias, judges, democracy

Introduction

The public perception of women in positions of authority

plays a critical role in how and when women are able to

occupy those positions. This has prompted a burgeoning

literature on the impression created by female legislators

and executives, demonstrating a connection between the

presence of women in these roles and improved popular

evaluations of the overall political system. Much less

attention has been paid to this dynamic in the context of

the judiciary. Initial evidence from stable democracies

shows a similar relationship between women’s presence

and positive evaluations of the regime but does not ad-

dress how this dynamic may change in non-democracies

or those countries in a period of regime transition. In this

article, we address this gap and argue that the context of

regime transition cultivates a unique dynamic in which

gender bias—and specif‌ically, hostile bias—triggers un-

expected support for women in the highest court. That is,

we argue that the context of losing one’s democracy

causes certain citizens to react to women justices in

surprising ways due to their desire to maintain or return to

more democratic traits. While hostile bias is negatively

correlated with perceptions of legitimacy of women-

dominated courts in stable democracies, we argue that

the unique political context of a transitional regime causes

those citizens with hostile bias to see women as potentially

valuable. We test our theories using an original data set of

over 600 survey respondents in Poland and Thailand and

f‌ind evidence that women’s judicial presence in the

context of a transitioning regime sometimes triggers

citizens with hostile bias to see women as potential saviors

of the democracy, though not always. These f‌indings

indicate that the presence of women on courts is suff‌icient

to generate improved evaluations of the democratic health

1

Department of Political Science, Portland State University, Portland,

OR, USA

Corresponding Author:

Christopher Shortell, Department of Political Science, Portland State

University, Hatf‌ield School of Government, P.O. Box 751, Portland,

OR 97207-0751, USA.

Email: shortell@pdx.edu