Abstract
Two current members of the U.S. Supreme Court took their seats despite allegations of sexual harassment (Clarence Thomas) and sexual assault (Brett Kavanaugh) leveled against them during their confirmation hearings. In each instance, the Senate vote was close and split mainly along party lines: Republicans for and Democrats against. Polls showed that a similar division existed among party supporters in the electorate. There are, however, differences among rank-and-file partisans that help shape their views on the issues raised by these two controversial appointments to the nation’s highest court. Using data from a national survey of registered voters, we examine the factors associated with citizens’ attitudes about the role of women in politics, the extent to which sexism is a problem in society, the recent avalanche of sexual harassment charges made against elected officials and other political (as well as entertainment, business, and academic) figures, and the #MeToo movement. We are particularly interested in whether a strong sense of partisan identity adds significantly to our understanding of people’s attitudes on these matters. In addition, our experimental evidence allows us to determine whether shared partisanship overrides other factors when an elected official from one’s own party is accused of sexual misbehavior.
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Data Availability
The dataset can be downloaded from: https://www.dropbox.com/s/u1xik7fdjz92c7q/CraigCossettePolBehavior_2018%20survey.dta?dl=0.
Code Availability
The code (Stata do file) can be downloaded here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2qufmg4tfk6d9u0/PoliticalBehavior.do?dl=0.
Notes
The final vote was 52–48, split largely along party lines.
As of this writing, the VAWA has expired. Although the Democrat-controlled House passed a full re-authorization and revision of the bill in April 2019, the Senate has yet to act; see Willis (2019).
Following a series of misconduct cases that came to light in 2017 and 2018 (suggesting that the system was not working as intended), Congress passed new legislation that holds members personally liable for any financial settlements resulting from harassment and retaliation, and mandates a public reporting of any such settlements (Tully-McManus and Lesniewski 2018).
Reflecting on the Kavanaugh controversy, Jocelyn Frye, an African-American lawyer and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, made the following observation: “27 years later, we have the same phenomenon rearing its head again. The people who have an interest in protecting the status quo... are attacking the integrity of Dr. Ford. It was hard to watch 27 years ago and it’s [agonizing] to watch now. To see many of the lessons that we should have learned in 1991 being ignored is infuriating” (D. Smith 2018).
Surveys conducted over the years give us little reason to believe that there is (or ever has been) a consensus among the American public as to what, exactly, constitutes sexual harassment. See, for example, Collins and Blodgett (1981), Kolbert (1991), Tinkler (2008), Kahn (2017); Daily Chart (2017). According to the aforementioned Ipsos/NPR poll from October 2018, 50% of all respondents (54% men, 46% women) agreed with the statement that “it can be hard sometimes to tell what is sexual harassment and what is not.” Moreover, behavior that is labeled by some as sexual harassment (e.g., solicitation for sex, “quid pro quo” harassment, inappropriate touching, etc.) is considered by others to be a form of sexual assault. In our study, some of these behaviors are classified as sexual harassment because we modeled our experimental treatments (described below) after news stories that reported alleged misconduct by prominent political figures. These stories typically framed the behaviors in question as harassment rather than assault, though we acknowledge that this line is blurry and any given act may be interpreted differently by different individuals.
While this statement is undoubtedly true, it fails to capture the nuances that are evident in public attitudes about sex crimes, offenders, and victims; for example, see Pickett et al. (2013), King and Roberts (2017), King (2019). However, in contrast to the lack of consensus reported in note 7, most Americans do have “a general conceptual understanding” of the difference between sexual assault and sexual harassment. When asked open-ended questions about how they would define these actions, respondents in the 2018 Ipsos/NPR survey tended to use more terms denoting “coercive action” regarding the former (e.g., ‘forcing,” “consent,” “attacked”), and more terms denoting “verbal or emotional forms of abuse” with respect to the latter (e.g., “feel,” “make,” “saying”). See https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/NPR-Sexual-Harassment-and-Assault.
Although the success of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and others suggests that infidelity (especially when it involves a consensual act between adults, something that is rarely if ever the case for instances of workplace harassment) may not carry the stigma with voters that it once did, experience tells us that other kinds of “moral lapses” can exact a heavy political toll (Stanton 2015; Weiser 2017). In addition, there are offenses not involving either money or sex for which officeholders and candidates may be held accountable (Redlawsk and McCann 2005; Basinger 2013).
See Cossette and Craig (2020) and our supporting materials (the latter can be viewed at https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmakm2qmivojsn0/appendix.docx?dl=0) for additional details. Consistent with the results reported by Barnes and Cassese (2017), the gender gap on these items was greater among Republican identifiers than among Democrats. Even so, there is a subset of mostly white Republican women (and a smaller number of white female Democrats) who believe that women are less capable than men, who respond negatively to behavior that violates traditional gender stereotypes, who do not view gender inequality in society or politics as a function of discrimination or other structural obstacles facing women, and who therefore are less likely to be supportive of women who claim to have been victims of sexual harassment or assault. These attitudes are characteristic of what has been called “hostile sexism” and help to explain why the gender gap is not larger than it appears in our data. See Glick and Fiske (2001), Frasure-Yokley (2018), Cassese and Barnes (2019), Cassese and Holman (2019), Glick (2019), Luks and Schaffner (2019).
In this regard, little has changed since Clarence Thomas squared off against Anita Hill in 1991: https://www.aei.org/politics-and-public-opinion/the-anita-hill-controversy-what-the-polls-said/.
For more on partisan identity and affective polarization in contemporary American politics, see Green et al. (2002), Huddy et al. (2015), Iyengar and Westwood (2015), Ahler and Sood (2018), Iyengar and Krupenkin (2018), Levendusky (2018), Mason (2018), Sides et al. (2018), Strickler (2018), Egan (2019).
A qualitative approach focused on specific cases is probably better suited for observing the kind of back-and-forth that often occurs in real life. The drawback is that case study results, however insightful, cannot be generalized to the larger population of cases with which scholars are typically concerned.
The need for image repair might be present, for example, when a politician takes a policy position that is unpopular with constituents (McGraw 1990), faces negative attacks over the course of an election campaign (Craig et al. 2014), or is accused of engaging in some sort of illegal, unethical, or immoral behavior (Benoit 2017). This literature is discussed more fully in Cossette and Craig (2020).
Data were provided by Qualtrics (www.qualtrics.com), a web interface and data collection service, from panels consisting of millions of pre-screened individuals recruited to participate in a variety of research studies. Respondents were drawn from a national panel and self-identified as registered voters. The sample was collected to meet demographic quotas reflecting the gender (53% female), race/ethnicity (72% identifying as non-Hispanic white, 12.7% African American, 9.7% Hispanic, 3.7% Asian, and 1.6% “other”), age (9.5% between 18 and 24, 15.6% between 25 and 34, 15.1% between 35 and 44, 17.8% between 45 and 54, 18.7% between 55 and 64, and 23.3% aged 65 and over), and education level (5.9% less than high school, 26.0% high-school graduates, 31.0% some college, 24.8% college graduates, and 12.4% with at least some post-graduate education) distributions of the population of registered voters as reported by the US Census. Our data include only respondents who completed the entire survey and who correctly answered two questions used as manipulation checks (see Cossette and Craig 2020). Although Qualtrics’s panel is quite diverse, we make no claim that it is representative of registered voters nationwide.
Index scores (alpha = 0.83 for Democrats, 0.83 for Republicans, 0.63 for Independents), which range from 3 to 15, were collapsed so that 13–15 = strong sense of identity (32.8% of Democrats, 27.5% of Republicans, and 25.2% of Independents), 10–12 = moderate sense of identity (29.9%, 33.7%, and 46.6%, respectively), and 3–9 = weak sense of identity (37.4%, 38.6%, 27.7%). One self-identified Republican and one Independent provided incomplete answers on the identity questions and were coded as missing.
Independent identity is less often studied and, as a result, less well-understood than its partisan counterparts. It is also perhaps less interesting theoretically, at least for our purposes (given that our experimental vignettes portray candidates with party affiliations), and prior research provides relatively little guidance as to how a strong group identity might be expected to shape the reactions of Independents to those vignettes. It does appear, however, that some self-identified Independents exhibit stronger in-group favoritism and out-group disaffection than others and that (the evidence is mixed here) this may lead to distinctive patterns of political behavior. Although strong-identity Independents might logically be expected to evaluate scandal-plagued candidates from both parties more negatively than weak-identity Independents, we include non-identifiers in our analysis primarily for purposes of comparison with Democrats and Republicans. For more on the nature of Independent identity, see Greene (1999, 2004), Klar (2014); Huddy et al. (2015); Klar and Krupnikov (2016).
Many respondents either took a “mixed/in-between” position with regard to #MeToo (17.9% Democrats, 23.1% Republicans) or did not “know enough about the movement” to offer an opinion (12.8% and 18.2%, respectively). A sizable number, including more Republicans than Democrats, also took a middle position on the other two questions noted here. See our supporting materials for details.
These biographies were crafted in such a way as to ensure that the two portrayals were essentially equivalent; see Fig. 1 and our supporting materials. To clarify: Each of our twelve vignettes pitted an incumbent (the target of allegations in all instances) against a challenger of the opposite party and sex. An effort was made to keep biographies free from any hint of controversy, e.g., both candidates were said to be married (with children), born and raised locally, college graduates with advanced degrees, military veterans, and active in civic organizations. Details for each man and each woman remained the same even as the party affiliation of the candidates varied across treatments.
The randomization process appears to have been successful, as no statistically significant pre-exposure differences were observed among members of the various groups with regard to demographics, partisanship, ideological self-identification, issue positions, or baseline candidate preferences. We can therefore be confident that any post-treatment differences were driven by the experimental stimuli.
The content of both allegations and responses was based on actual cases reported in the news, mostly during the period since the Weinstein scandal broke in October 2017. In writing the treatments for each combination of incumbent party and gender, the only words that varied were the candidate’s name, relevant pronouns, and a few small details to reflect differences in likely behavior based on candidate gender (e.g. the male incumbent was accused of touching a woman’s thighs, while the female was accused of touching a man’s buttocks). Otherwise, treatments for Democratic and Republican incumbents employ identical language; we provide the text for the male Republican here only as an example. Wordings for all twelve treatments can be found in our supporting materials.
The complete script for these responses is provided in our supporting materials. See Cossette and Craig (2020) for further details.
Ultimately, this is a question that will only be answered with the passage of time. For a discussion of other factors (including, among men, masculine identity, perceived threat to one’s masculinity, and narcissism) that may contribute to sexually inappropriate behavior, see Quinn (2002), Robinson (2005), Maass and Cadinu (2006), Berdahl (2007), McLaughlin et al. (2012), Zeigler-Hill et al. (2016), Berdahl et al. (2018), Walker (2018), Halper and Rios (2019).
Although this might seem counterintuitive, it is based on the fact that very few out-party identifiers supported the incumbent (5.3% for a male incumbent, 13.2% for a female) even before reading about the harassment allegations. As noted by Vonnahme (2014; also see von Sikorski et al. 2019) and confirmed by her experimental data, “opponents of a candidate may have little room to downgrade their evaluation of the candidate, whereas affect has substantial room to plummet among supporters after scandal involvement” (p. 1311).
The complete dataset can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/u1xik7fdjz92c7q/CraigCossettePolBehavior_2018%20survey.dta?dl=0.
Although the difference here (p < 0.01) suggests that Independents may be more likely to punish women than men for sexual misconduct, the post-allegation decline in favorability does not vary significantly by candidate gender among this group.
We look at change in this instance using OLS because, unlike vote preference, the favorability variable is not dichotomous. When this model is replicated using favorability at T2 as our dependent variable (and including favorability at T1 as a predictor), results are very similar to those portrayed in Fig. 3. The same is true when we run the favorability model using ordered logit, with favorability at T2 as dependent (and including favorability at T1 as a predictor).
See Fig. A1 in our supporting materials.
Results are similar for incumbent favorability, with one exception: while the probability of Democratic co-partisans voting for the incumbent at T2 increased at higher levels of partisan identity, stronger-identity co-partisans actually reduced their favorability score to a greater extent following the allegations than did their weaker-identity counterparts (see Fig. A2 in our supporting materials for details).
See Benoit (2015)
T-test tables can be found in our supporting materials.
While some might worry that our results will encourage sexual predators to employ such an account strategy in a cynical (and dishonest) effort to salvage their political career, we believe that there are times when a denial is simply not credible, at least in the long run. Further, the lack of clear evidence makes it difficult in many “she said/he said” disputes to determine what actually happened—but this seems more likely to be the case when sexual assault is alleged than in cases involving workplace harassment, where the presence of witnesses and multiple accusers telling reinforcing stories may leave less reason to doubt that the behavior in question occurred. For a consideration of the effectiveness of denial relative to other account strategies, see Benoit (2015).
See Cossette and Craig (2020) for additional details, as well as Fig. A3 and Tables A3 and A4b in our supporting materials. In most cases, denial also was the most effective response for (partially) reversing the loss of favorability that occurred following a reading of the allegations.
As with the post-allegation findings, we observe differences between the results for vote and favorability for the Democratic incumbent. Whereas Democratic co-partisans and Independents with stronger partisan identities were more likely to vote for the incumbent after reading the response, the opposite was true for favorability; that is, strong-identity Democrats and Independents reduced the rating of the Democratic incumbent more than weak identifiers at T3. For the Republican incumbent, similar results were observed for vote choice and favorability (see our supporting materials for details).
Respondents were asked at T3 whether they agreed or disagreed with “those who are calling for [name] to resign [his/her] seat in Congress?” Our analysis indicated that identity helped to shape the attitudes of Republican voters (but not of Democrats) on this question; specifically, those with a strong attachment were more likely than weak-identity Republicans to support resignation—but only when the incumbent in question was a Democrat. See Cossette and Craig (2020) for further details.
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The survey in this study was funded by the University of Florida Graduate Program in Political Campaigning and the Washington College Faculty Enhancement Fund.
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Craig, S.C., Cossette, P.S. Eye of the Beholder: Partisanship, Identity, and the Politics of Sexual Harassment. Polit Behav 44, 749–777 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09631-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09631-4