Reassessing Public Support for a Female President
12 Pages Posted: 20 Jan 2017
Date Written: September 19, 2016
Abstract
We redeploy a list experiment conducted a decade ago to reassess the degree to which the American public opposes electing a woman as President. We find that opposition has been cut in half from approximately 26% to 13%. In addition, opposition is now concentrated in specific sociodemographic categories rather than being evenly distributed. Newly developed statistical methods that permit multivariate analysis of list experiment data reveal that resistance has all but disappeared among Democratic-leaning groups in the electorate. These patterns appear to reflect the reduction of uncertainty among groups most favorable toward the recent success of Democratic women.
Keywords: List experiment, gender bias, social desirability, representation
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