Playing the Women’s Card: How Women Respond to Female Candidates’ Descriptive Versus Substantive Representation

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-581
Author(s):  
Danielle Joesten Martin
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Design ◽  
Policy Position ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Substantive Representation ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Female Candidate ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Nationally Representative

When presented the choice between a male and female candidate, it is commonly assumed that women prefer a female candidate. But as more policy and ideologically diverse women run for office, this assumption may not hold true. Using an experimental design embedded in a nationally representative survey, I test how voters respond to female candidates with ideologies and abortion positions similar and contrary to their own preferences. I find that women, generally, prefer a female candidate, but support for a female candidate among women decreases significantly when she has a contrary ideology or policy position. Whether women prefer descriptive or substantive representation also is conditioned on individual-level characteristics. This study advances our understanding of voters’ responses to female candidates’ varying ideological and issue positions, which is increasingly important as more women run for office. Although women are more likely than men to give female candidates the benefit of the doubt, not just any female candidate will do—she needs to appeal to women on issue and ideological grounds too.

Trumping Politics as Usual

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Boatright ◽  
Valerie Sperling
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Major Party ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Candidate ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Persistent Pattern ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
Democrats And Republicans

Who is tougher? In many elections, candidates frame their appeals in gendered ways—they compete, for instance, over who is more “masculine.” This is the case for male and female candidates alike. In the 2016 presidential election, however, the stark choice between the first major-party female candidate and a man who exhibited a persistent pattern of misogyny made the use of gender—ideas about femininity and masculinity—more prominent than ever before. This book explores the Trump and Clinton campaigns’ use of gender as a political weapon, and how the presidential race changed the ways in which House and Senate campaigns were waged in 2016. The thesis of this book is that Donald Trump’s candidacy radically altered the nature of the 2016 congressional campaigns in two ways. First, it changed the issues of contention in many of these races by making gender more central to the general election campaigns of both Democrats and Republicans. Second, expectations that Trump would lose the election influenced how candidates for lower office campaigned and how willing they were to connect their fortunes to those of their party’s nominee. The fact that Trump was expected to lose—and was expected to lose in large part because of his sexist and other bigoted comments—caused both major parties to direct more of their resources toward congressional races, and led many Republican candidates—especially women—to distance themselves from Trump.

Stereotypes, Who to Blame? Exploring Individual-Level Determinants of Flemish Voters’ Political Gender Stereotypes

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172092480
Author(s):  
Robin Devroe
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Policy Position ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Political Candidates ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Belgian Population ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Level Of Agreement

The gender of political candidates is associated with particular personality traits, capacities and opinions. The extent to which voters apply these political gender stereotypes to their evaluation of political candidates is influenced by both contextual- and individual-level attributes. This article, based on an experimental study conducted among a representative sample of the Flemish (Belgian) population, examines the individual-level determinants of voters’ political gender stereotypes. Our results indicate that political gender stereotypes are only present to a limited extent in Flanders, even among the most likely groups such as older and lower educated voters. Furthermore, stereotype reliance is generally not conditioned by individual-level determinants. Most importantly, the finding that respondents’ perceptions of female candidates is primarily based on their level of agreement with the content of the presented policy position, demonstrates that other cues outweigh the importance of candidate gender.

scholarly journals Partisan Bias in Blame Attribution: When Does it Occur?

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Healy ◽  
Alexander G. Kuo ◽  
Neil Malhotra
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Design ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Government Performance ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Partisan Bias ◽  
Government Failure ◽  
Blame Attribution ◽  
Blame Attributions ◽  
Real World Setting ◽  
Nationally Representative

AbstractHow do citizens attribute blame in the wake of government failure? Does partisanship bias these attributions? While partisan cues may serve as useful guides when citizens are evaluating public policies, those cues are likely to be less informative and more distortionary when evaluating government performance regarding a crisis. We address these questions by examining blame attributions to government appointees for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We implement an experimental design in a nationally representative survey that builds on previous work in two ways: (1) we manipulate party labels for the same officials in a real-world setting by considering appointees who were nominated at different times by presidents of different parties; and (2) we examine how domain relevance moderates partisan bias. We find that partisan bias in attributions is strongest when officials are domain relevant, a finding that has troubling implications for representative democracy.

INVASIVE YET INEVITABLE? PRIVACY NORMALIZATION TRENDS IN EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sejin Paik ◽  
Kate K. Mays ◽  
Rebecca F. Giovannetti ◽  
James E. Katz
Keyword(s):  
Technology Acceptance ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Emerging Technology ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Private Companies ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Dna Collection ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Using Data

In the last few years, smart security and physical identification technologies have grown exponentially; people are increasingly installing smart video devices to monitor their homes and buying DNA kits to collect and analyze their genetics. As the number of users and profits of these businesses increase, so too does the potential for privacy violations and exploitation. To explore these dynamics of privacy in emerging technology, we conducted a U.S. nationally representative survey (N=1,587) and asked respondents for their perceptions of a number of emerging technologies such as facial recognition, DNA collection and biometrics monitoring. We also measured individual-level traits that have been found to influence technology acceptance. The results show that the actor wielding the technology matters for people’s acceptance. Respondents were overall more comfortable with public officials and airlines using more invasive technologies to guarantee people’s safety, as compared to private companies or non-profits using data for research. When keeping the actor constant across privacy technologies, there was an overwhelming preference for less invasive means of privacy data sharing. These findings indicate how the concept of normalization, social context and agents of control play a critical role in the way people accept emerging technology into their lives.

Helping or hurting? Effects of sexism and likeability on third party perceptions of women

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (10) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Warren ◽  
Mona Zanhour ◽  
Mark Washburn ◽  
Brianna Odom
Keyword(s):  
Positive Outcome ◽  
Benevolent Sexism ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Hostile Sexism ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Candidate ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Adverse Impacts ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
The Relationship

Hostile and benevolent sexism continue to have adverse impacts on opportunities for advancement of women in organizations. In this study we examined the relationship between observer assessments and male interviewer sexism, emphasizing sexism's impact on perceptions of female candidates' hireability and competence. The sample included 266 male and female participants randomized as observers across interview scenarios. Scenario conditions varied between hostile, benevolent, and neutral interviewers, but the female candidate remained neutral. We found that benevolent sexism implies a positive outcome of enhanced observer perception of hireability with little stigma associated with the female candidate's competence, whereas hostile sexism had an overall negative effect, which was offset by observer impressions of likeability of the female job candidate who maintained a neutral composure. Our study findings suggest that observers' perceptions of sexism, benevolence, and a woman candidate's likeability differ and may change with experience. Perception of likeability, in particular, may provide a positive relational strategy for mitigating the effect of benevolent sexism without the tradeoff of perceived diminished competence.

scholarly journals Educating for Democracy in a Partisan Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Kahne ◽  
Benjamin Bowyer
Keyword(s):  
Media Literacy ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Policy Position ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Public Issues ◽  
Media Literacy Education ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Nationally Representative

This article investigates youth judgments of the accuracy of truth claims tied to controversial public issues. In an experiment embedded within a nationally representative survey of youth ages 15 to 27 ( N = 2,101), youth were asked to judge the accuracy of one of several simulated online posts. Consistent with research on motivated reasoning, youth assessments depended on (a) the alignment of the claim with one’s prior policy position and to a lesser extent on (b) whether the post included an inaccurate statement. To consider ways educators might improve judgments of accuracy, we also investigated the influence of political knowledge and exposure to media literacy education. We found that political knowledge did not improve judgments of accuracy but that media literacy education did.

Anatomy of audience duplication networks: How individual characteristics differentially contribute to fragmentation in news consumption and trust

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482199155
Author(s):  
Yilang Peng ◽  
Tian Yang
Keyword(s):  
Media Exposure ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Individual Factors ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Audience Fragmentation ◽  
Media Trust ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Individual

While partisan selective exposure could drive audience fragmentation, other individual factors might also differentiate news diets. This study applies a method that disentangles the differential contributions of the individual characteristics to audience duplication networks. By analyzing a nationally representative survey about US adults’ media use in 2019 ( N = 12,043), we demonstrate that news fragmentation is driven by a myriad of individual factors, such as gender, race, and religiosity. Partisanship is still an important driver. We also distinguish between media exposure and media trust, showing that many cross-cutting ties in co-exposure networks disappear when media trust is considered. We conclude that audience fragmentation research should extend beyond ideological selectivity and additionally investigate how and why other individual-level preferences differentially contribute to fragmentation both in news exposure and in news trust.

Do I Look and Sound Religious? Interviewer Religious Appearance and Attitude Effects on Respondents’ Answers

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeina N Mneimneh ◽  
Julie de Jong ◽  
Kristen Cibelli Hibben ◽  
Mansoor Moaddel
Keyword(s):  
Accurate Information ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Independent Effects ◽  
Survey Responses ◽  
Variance Explained

Abstract Research has shown that interviewers can significantly affect survey respondents’ reported attitudes and behaviors. Several interviewer characteristics have been found to partially explain variation in respondents’ answers across interviewers, particularly when questions are related to interviewers’ observable characteristics such as gender, race, and age. However, less is known about if and how interviewers’ religious appearance and religious attitudes affect survey responses and, more specifically, reports about religious attitudes. Collecting accurate information on religious attitudes is important, given the sensitivity of this information across the globe and the growing interest in understanding religious perceptions and misconceptions. This paper is the first to investigate (a) the independent effects and the interplay between interviewers’ religious veil status and interviewers’ religious attitudes on respondents’ reported religious attitudes and (b) the magnitude of the interviewer variance explained by interviewers’ religious characteristics. The data comes from a nationally representative survey of religious and political attitudes in Tunisia carried out in 2013. Data from the survey also includes information about interviewers’ characteristics (including veil status for females) and interviewers’ own religious attitudes based on their responses to the same survey questions asked of respondents. Results showed that respondents interviewed by veiled female interviewers reported greater religiosity than respondents interviewed by unveiled female interviewers. Equally important were interviewers’ religious attitudes, which also independently affected the corresponding attitudes of respondents and explained a substantial percentage of the between-interviewer variance for several outcomes. The effect of interviewers’ attitudes on respondents’ attitudes was not stronger among veiled interviewers. Our investigation also revealed that the effect of interviewers’ attitudes on respondents’ reported attitudes operated somewhat differently for male and female respondents depending on the specific survey items. Future studies are needed to explore the mechanism(s) underlying these effects.

Not in His Image: The Moderating Effect of Gender on Religious Appeals

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian R. Calfano ◽  
Paul A. Djupe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Experimental Design ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
United States Senate ◽  
Moderating Effect ◽  
Campaign Strategy ◽  
Female Candidate ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Voter Perceptions ◽  
Male Candidate

AbstractReligious appeals have been part and parcel of campaign strategy for decades. Most often, however, these appeals to have come from men, but little is known about howwomenwould fare using religious appeals on the campaign trail. To remedy this, we used an experimental design to examine voter reaction to religious appeals from a female and a male candidate competing for an open United States Senate seat. We find that women's use of religious appeals is governed by the dynamics of tokenism — reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes and serving to reduce voter support of the female candidate. This suggests that women must be careful in using a key campaign tool traditionally employed by men, and that this may affect the extent to which female candidates can effectively shape voter perceptions on the campaign trail.

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