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AbstractWe examined how locally situated and transnationally circulated meanings of feminism interact forming implicit cultural meanings, and how these meanings about feminism appear in women's accounts of their own work and identifications. Using twenty‐four oral histories, we identified four implicit cultural meanings about feminism: (1) "Mainstream" feminism is/as white and middle‐class; (2) Feminists are lesbians; (3) Feminism is/as hostile to men; and (4) Feminism is/as a "western" ideology. In addition, we identified three strategies activists used to respond to these meanings: (1) distancing themselves from the word "feminist/feminism"; (2) explicitly embracing the term and clarifying its meaning; and (3) shifting from an individual to a structural level of analysis. Examining these discourses in a multinational sample with women of various racial‐ethnic and indigenous identities, we found that implicit cultural meanings often identified in the US or as western interact with locally found meanings affecting activists in the Majority World. Activists' use of these implicit cultural meanings complicated prevalent, but often simplistic, narratives about feminists, feminism, and identity.

Vulnerability is a standard criterion used by state and non-governmental organizations to identify groups of people in need of protection or support. Over the past two decades, however, this notoriously ill-defined and potentially stigmatizing term has been subjected to scrutiny by researchers, service providers, and theorists across multiple disciplines. This study examines the relevance of vulnerability to the ways international feminist activists who were interviewed between 2003 and 2019 for the Global Feminisms Project (GFP) described their struggles for women's rights in various settings over the past 50 years. Citing examples from nine countries, we show that these activists rarely used the term vulnerable, and never to classify groups of people. Instead, they frequently explained how particular groups were subjected to precarious conditions, and how they resisted subjugation, within multiple layers of gendered social relations and political structures. Many activists connected their locally-grounded work to global historical processes, emphasizing particularly the impact of neo-liberalism. Although using different vocabularies, these analyses resonate with work by bioethicists and feminist/queer theorists who reject the use of vulnerability as a classificatory term but embrace it as a tool for analyzing subjugation, building solidarity, and challenging neo-liberal conceptions of individual autonomy.

AbstractIn the wake of the 2016 election, which surprised pundits and voters on both the left and the right, there has been renewed interest in understanding what predicts American voters' choices. In this article, we investigate the roles of personality and issue importance in how people voted in the 2016 U.S. election. In this longitudinal study of 403 MTurk workers who voted in the election, we assessed the relations between personality (openness, social dominance orientation, and national identity importance) and issue importance (group rights and social justice, economic rights, and individual and national rights), and voting for Clinton or Trump. Our results indicate that both individual differences and issue importance as measured in July 2016 predicted votes in November. We also found that the links between personality and voting were mediated by issue importance. Implications for political psychology and the study of personality, campaign issues, and voting behavior are discussed.

AbstractIn two studies, we examine how different processes might underlie the political mobilization of individuals with marginalized versus privileged identities for left‐wing activism (LWA) versus right‐wing activism (RWA). In the first study, with a sample of 244 midlife women, we tested the hypotheses that endorsement of system justification beliefs and social identities were direct predictors of political activism, and that system justification beliefs moderated the mobilization of social identities for activism on both the left and the right. We found that system justification predicted RWA only among those who felt close to privileged groups; the parallel reverse effect did not hold for LWA, though rejection of system‐justifying beliefs was an important direct predictor. In Study 2, we replicated many of these findings with a sample of 113 college students. In addition, we tested and confirmed the hypothesis that LWA is predicted by openness to experience and is unrelated to RWA, but not that openness plays a stronger role among those with marginalized identities. These two studies together support our overall hypothesis that different personality processes are involved with political mobilization of privileged and marginalized individuals on the right and the left.

AbstractWe examined how racial‐ethnic identity centrality, or the importance of race/ethnicity in people's self‐perceptions, affected peoples' support for the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2020 US election. We explored this association by examining the mediating role of trust in important social institutions. In Study 1, we examined these effects by comparing the pattern of relationships among people of color (POC) and white people, using a sample of 177 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants. In Study 2, we expanded our focus on different racial‐ethnic groups, by comparing effects for Black, Latinx, Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI), and white participants, using a sample of 530 MTurk workers. Although there were a few findings that ran contrary to our expectations, the two studies generally found that trust in institutions that challenge the status quo, such as the media, explained the relationship between identity centrality and support for candidates among POC, especially Black and Latinx participants. We also found that trust in institutions that uphold the status quo, such as police and courts, explained the relationship between racial‐ethnic identity centrality and support for candidates among white people.