When a woman asks to be voted to a sexist constituency: Was Giorgia Meloni’s gender an advantage, a disadvantage or an irrelevant factor in the 2022 Italian general election?

In this study, we aimed to explore whether Giorgia Meloni’s gender was an advantage, a disadvantage or an irrelevant factor in the 2022 Italian general election. Using data sets from two electoral surveys conducted with two quota samples of the adult Italian population, Ns = 1,572 (ITANES data set) and 1,150 (COCO data set), we predicted the vote in the election as a function of participants’ gender, beliefs about gender and their interaction, controlling for the key sociodemographic and political variables. Two multinomial logistic regression converged to show that participants’ gender and beliefs about gender were neither additively nor multiplicatively associated with the vote. Thus, we conclude that Meloni’s gender was not a determinant of the outcome of the 2022 Italian general election results.