Suchergebnisse

White evangelicals–both men and women–are a mainstay of the Republican Party. What accounts for their ongoing loyalty, particularly when Republican candidates and leaders fail to embody closely held moral standards around sexual monogamy and propriety, as Donald Trump did in 2016? To answer this question, I draw on research about social sorting and polarization, as well as gender and religion gaps in public opinion, to theorize about the nature of the cross-pressures partisans may experience as a result of the religious and gender identifications they hold. Using data from the 2016 American National Election Study, I evaluate whether cross-cutting identities have a moderating effect on partisans' thinking about gender issues, their evaluations of the presidential candidates, and their relationship to the parties. I find only modest evidence that gender and evangelical identification impact political thinking among white Republicans, including their reactions to the Access Hollywood tape. Other groups, however, experienced more significant cross-pressures in 2016. Both evangelical Democrats and secular Republicans reported less polarized affective reactions to the presidential candidates and the parties. The results highlight the contingent role that gender and religious identities play in the United States' highly polarized political climate.

ObjectiveThis article documents dehumanization in the 2016 presidential contest.MethodsUsing a mixed‐method approach, I analyze dehumanized portrayals of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in visual campaign rhetoric and on common survey measures of dehumanization.ResultsImages from the campaign discourse reflect animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization of the presidential candidates. The survey data reveal that voters dehumanize opposition candidates and party members in both subtle and blatant ways that also reflect this animalistic–mechanistic distinction.ConclusionThe findings affirm the external validity of measurement strategies for dehumanization by showing the correspondence between campaign imagery and common survey‐based measurement tools. This work situates dehumanization as a psychological process relevant to the study of campaigns and elections.

"Intersectional Stereotyping in Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

In this study, we use an experiment to evaluate how the framing of breast cancer threat shapes women's preferences for government spending on breast cancer research and treatment programs. The results indicate that framing breast cancer in terms of mortality elicits feelings of anxiety, which in turn heightens support for government spending on behalf of women. Despite the salience of breast cancer as a women's health issue, this relationship does not hold for the full sample of women. Instead, we observe a great deal of heterogeneity in reactions to the issue frames based on two individual‐level factors: (1) women's perceptions of their own personal risk for developing the disease and (2) the extent to which women have a general tendency to experience and express anxiety—what psychologists refer to as their level of trait anxiety. These two lines of inquiry—personality traits as moderators of framing effects and emotion as a consequence of framing—have previously been investigated somewhat independently. In this article, we integrate the two In order to gain insight into the complexity of the psychological processes that underlie public opinion toward women's health. The results highlight the need for political rhetoric to underscore personal risk in order to mobilize support for spending on breast cancer research and treatment among women.

Late in the 2016 U.S. Presidential primary, Donald Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for playing the "woman's card." Theories of system justification suggest that attitudes about gender, particularly endorsement of hostile and benevolent sexism, likely shaped reactions to this campaign attack. Using a set of two studies, we find that hostile sexists exposed to the attack showed increased support for Trump and decreased support for Clinton. Benevolent sexists, however, reacted to Trump's statements with increased support for Clinton, consistent with benevolent sexism's focus on protecting women (Study 1). We further found that the woman card attack produced distinct emotional reactions among those with low and high levels of hostile and benevolent sexism. The attack also increased political participation among hostile sexists (Study 2). Our results offer new insights into the role of sexism in the 2016 presidential contest and further the discipline's understanding of the gendered dimension of negative campaigning.