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Hostile Sexism, Racial Resentment, and Political Mobilization

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Abstract

We argue that hostile sexism and racial resentment play an important and somewhat underappreciated role in American elections through their influence on voter turnout and engagement with political campaigns. The effects of these attitudes are not straightforward but depend on partisanship. We evaluate whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism cross-pressure Democratic partisans, resulting in lower levels of political participation. We further consider whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism bolster participation among Republicans. We find evidence of these divergent effects on the political mobilization of white voters using the 2016 American National Election Study. The results support our expectations and suggest that cuing resentment-based attitudes was an important strategy for engaging voters in the 2016 presidential campaign and will likely play an important role in future campaigns as well.

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Notes

  1. Other research in this vein explores how the presence or absence of racialized candidates influences voter turnout. This work does not necessarily include direct measures of racial attitudes, but the implication is that racial attitudes underlie turnout disparities related to candidates’ racial characteristics (see for example Gay 2001; Medenica and Fowler 2020; Philpot, Shaw, and McGowen 2009). Research does not link the presence of women on the ballot to changes in voter turnout rates (Dolan 2006).

  2. Pasek et al (2014) explore multiple measures of racial animus. They find an effect for symbolic racism and racial stereotypes, but not racial resentment.

  3. Racial attitudes were likely linked to perceptions of Donald Trump from the very start of his campaign. Trump gained public attention and notoriety on a birther platform, by amplifying the conspiracy theory that the Barack Obama presidency was illegitimate because Obama was not born in the United States. Trump also employed explicitly racialized rhetoric during his presidential campaign, for instance, when describing immigrants from Mexico (Post 2015) and Muslims entering the U.S. (Johnson 2015).

  4. A combination of candidate characteristics and campaign rhetoric likely made gender-based attitudes like sexism more salient to voters. Hillary Clinton was the first woman to win a major party nomination and run in a general election. Her campaign stressed gendered themes, including the campaign slogan “I’m with her,” and many analysts noted a marked feminine turn from her 2008 campaign strategy, which stressed more masculine themes (Kornblut 2011). In addition to Clinton’s own messaging, Donald Trump made a number of comments about his female opponents’ appearances that were widely interpreted as sexist (Keneally 2016).

  5. Replication materials are available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FXGD96.

  6. We also ran models using the full seven-point self-placed ideological scale in place of ideological identity indicators. This made no substantive difference in the results we observed.

  7. Some might view the political participation scale as a count variable, but we report results from an OLS model because the substantive results produced by OLS and a Poisson model are identical, and the former is easier to more directly interpret. Note that the unweighted mean and variance of the political participation variable are not appreciably different from one another at 1.39 and 1.51 respectively. Furthermore, when we ran the Poisson regression, a chi-square test indicates that the model does not suffer from overdispersion. This suggests that the Poisson model was appropriate for the data.

  8. This means that the omitted category is Democratic identification.

  9. The state competitiveness measure is not a part of the ANES, but it, too, was also generated before the day of the election.

  10. We have no expectations for the effects of hostile sexism and racial resentment on the behavior of independents. These marginal effects are reported for the benefit of interested scholars but are otherwise not discussed.

  11. In addition to this analysis, we evaluated whether the relationship between partisanship and hostile sexism and/or racial resentment varied depending on respondent gender. We did not find a meaningful pattern of difference between men and women for any of the participation items. This result is consistent with existing research suggesting that Americans are more divided by their beliefs about gender than by their own gender identification (e.g., Deckman and Cassese, 2019; Sides et al. 2020).

  12. Interested readers can see the unweighted proportion of respondents who reported engaging in these activities in the table of summary statistics included in the supplemental appendix.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the attendees of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s American Politics Workshop, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this project. We also thank Nicholas Winter for modifying the combomarginsplot Stata package to allow us to better present our results.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, USA

    Kevin K. Banda

  2. Department of Political Science & International Relations, University of Delaware, Newark, USA

    Erin C. Cassese

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Correspondence to Kevin K. Banda.

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Banda, K.K., Cassese, E.C. Hostile Sexism, Racial Resentment, and Political Mobilization. Polit Behav 44, 1317–1335 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09674-7

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