Moroccans tend to assume their fellow citizens are less willing to vote for women than they actually are, and that mistaken belief may be holding back female candidates. That is the conclusion of a study published in October 2026 in the journal Political Behavior.<\/p>\n
Respondents overestimated how strongly men favour male candidates by about 5 percentage points on average. Yet the experiment found no clear overall bias against women in the choices participants made themselves.<\/p>\n
The research was carried out by Caroline Barnett of the University of Arizona, Alexandra Blackman of Cornell University and Marwa Shalby of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It draws on a survey of 1,800 people conducted in Morocco between August and October 2023. Of these, 873 took part in a hypothetical election experiment.<\/p>\n
Participants were shown profiles of fictional candidates that differed by gender, party, education, political experience and personal traits. They were asked to pick the person they would want to represent their constituency, then to predict which candidate the men and women around them would choose.<\/p>\n
Across 3,492 head-to-head comparisons, a candidate’s gender did not decide most choices. Women showed a slight preference for female candidates, picking them about 53% of the time. The authors found no strong statistical evidence that male respondents chose men simply because they were men.<\/p>\n
Expectations told a different story. Many respondents assumed men would back male candidates and women would back female ones, and those assumptions were stronger than the preferences participants actually expressed. Male respondents overstated men’s preference for male candidates by 7 points, compared with 3 points among female respondents. Participants also overestimated women’s support for female candidates by around 3 points.<\/p>\n
The order of the questions mattered. Men who were first asked to think about what other men in their circle would choose were more likely to pick a male candidate themselves. That tendency did not appear among men who gave their own preference first, and the researchers observed no similar effect among women.<\/p>\n
The authors suggest some voters may be swayed by what they see as the prevailing view in society, choosing a candidate of a given gender because of what they expect others to do, even without a personal preference based on gender.<\/p>\n
The study also cites World Values Survey data showing shifting attitudes in Morocco. The share of men who said men make better political leaders fell from about 80% in the early 2000s to 49.5% in 2021. Among women, it dropped from about 63% to 36% over the same period. The researchers read this as a sign that personal attitudes may be changing faster than perceptions of what others think.<\/p>\n