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¹⁷ By allowing respondents to choose which party speech they read an additional variable is introduced into the design. An alternative research design would have been to present students with no choice, but force them to read a specific party speech. I chose to allow students to select the speech they would read for four reasons. (1) The cover story emphasized the possibility of their participating in their party's choosing of candidates. A forced choice would have been inconsistent with the cover story. (2) In a pre-test I found that respondents who were a considerable political distance from the candidate were very negative to the candidate and gender had no effect. Candidate's gender did have an effect, in the pre-test, for those who identified politically with the speaker. (3) Allowing respondents to choose their party freely provides the opportunity to test whether women politicians are perceived differently across different political parties. (4) To the degree problems might be caused by party self-selection, they are easily controlled by making intra-party comparisons. For each packet both candidates were of the same gender, so candidate gender could not affect the respondent's speech choice.

¹⁸ I am greatly indebted to Jostein Ryssevik of NSD for his help in both identifying schools and in gaining access to the schools.

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²³ These results do not meet standard statistical tests, but that may be partially caused by small sample size. The pattern found for these policies is consistent with the results for the other policies.

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²⁹ One obvious criticism of this suggestion is that the causality runs not from issue importance to women's strength, but from women's strength to issues. That is, issues such as child day care and care for the elderly first become important when women start to be represented in substantial numbers in legislative bodies.

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