Measuring Support for Women’s Political Leadership: Gender of Interviewer Effects Among African Survey Respondents

Public opinion surveys are a fundamental tool to measure support for women’s political rights. This article focuses on perceptions of women’s suitability for leadership. To what extent do influential cross-country surveys that include such items suffer from measurement errors stemming from gender of interviewer effects? Building on the literature on social desirability, we expect that respondents are more likely to express preference for men’s suitability as political leaders with male interviewers and more likely to state support for women’s leadership when interviewed by a woman. We hypothesize that these processes are conditioned by having one’s spouse present, by age differences between respondents and interviewers, as well as by respondents’ levels of education. Analyzing Afrobarometer data, we generally find support for our claims. In addition, it seems that men are slightly more affected by such effects than women are. These gender of interviewer effects persist when analyzing alternative survey rounds and are insensitive to various fixed effects specifications and robustness tests. For the analysis of survey data, we suggest that researchers using gender-related items should control for gender of interviewer effects. We propose that comparative survey programs pay even more attention to interviewer characteristics and the interview situation in their protocols.