Opening the Attitudinal Black Box: Three Dimensions of Latin American Elites’ Attitudes about Gender Equality

Abstract

This paper takes one of the first, direct approaches to understanding which factors shape which attitudes towards gender equality among political elites. We examine support for gender equality among legislators in 13 Latin American countries, using 10 new questions from the 2015–2018 wave of the Latin American elites survey (PELA). We argue that legislators’ attitudes about gender equality fall into three distinct dimensions: holding egalitarian views, recognizing that gender inequality is a problem, and supporting state action to hasten gender equality. Overall, women express the more gender-equal orientation on all three dimensions, while factors like religiosity and ideology matter differently for different dimensions. These findings demonstrate the need for more nuance in measuring and analyzing attitudes towards gender equality, in order to better understand the link between descriptive and substantive representation.