Women Fight More Than Men Over Politics

Posted on June 6, 2014March 30, 2015 by Nudge Domain Admin

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Global Women’s Association

By Samara Klar
Published December 09, 2014

Congress made history this fall when the number of women elected to the House and Senate surpassed 100 for the first time, raising hopes that more women in Washington might improve bipartisanship.

My research suggests that, in fact, the opposite is likely to happen. Among voters, Republican and Democratic women appear to be even more antagonistic toward each other than Republican and Democratic men are.

That may seem odd given that women from both parties tend to care about many of the same issues, for example equal pay. Survey data I have collected suggest that women of both parties appear to share many policy priorities—70 percent of Republican women and 90 percent of Democratic women claim that women’s issues (broadly speaking) are important and a majority of women from each party rate the income gap between men and women as an important political issue.

Yet even when women are sticking together on their own issues, it’s only within their parties. More broadly, my research suggests that prospects for achieving bipartisan cooperation tend to be undermined by negative attitudes that Republican and Democratic women hold toward each other. This unique antagonism appears to be driven by a deep mistrust—and it is evident on both sides of the aisle.
In one experiment I conducted, I asked a large and nationally representative sample of women to read a news article about President Obama’s Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. The act was the first bill signed into law by Obama. Its chief contribution was to renew the statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination following each new pay cycle. The degree to which this act can effectively confront issues of wage discrimination has been debated (as has the extent of wage discrimination itself), but survey data show that women are significantly more in favor of the act than are men, and Democrats are more supportive of the act than are Republicans.

Each woman who participated in my study was randomly assigned to read a slightly different version of the news article.
One version of the article told the story of a Republican woman who opposes the act. A second version reported on a Republican woman who supports it. A third version of the article reported on a Republican man who opposes the act, and a fourth version reported on a Republican man who supports it. Four other versions of the article depicted Democratic men or women who either support or oppose the Lilly Ledbetter Act.
The articles were all completely identical, except for the name of the character (Linda Walsh for the women, and Lewis Walsh for the men), the party that the character identified with (either Republican or Democrat), and the character’s stance on the Lilly Ledbetter Act (either opposition or support).

After reading the assigned article, I asked each woman in my sample to tell me her opinion about the act itself, as well as her opinion about the individual depicted in the article. Finally, I asked each respondent for her opinion on political issues in general.
I first examined the attitudes among the women who participated in my study. As one might expect, both Republican women and Democratic women became most supportive of the act after reading about a woman from their own party who supports it. But what happens when my respondents read about a woman from the opposing party?

Republican women actually become significantly more opposed to the Lilly Ledbetter Act when a Democratic woman endorses it. This backlash effect can be attributed to the gender, as opposed to the partisanship, of the endorser because I was also able to measure how Republican women respond when Democratic men endorse the act. Republican women do not exhibit this same backlash against Democratic men. In fact, both Republican men and Democratic men succeed in persuading Republican women to support the act. Republican women only become more opposed to the act when it the endorsement comes from a Democratic woman.

Women from both parties demonstrated this disproportionately negative response to women from the opposing party.
I asked respondents to rank the trustworthiness of the character presented in the article. Democratic women rated women from their own party as significantly more trustworthy than Democratic men—but they rated Republican women as significantly less trustworthy than Republican men. Even when the Republican women and Republican men depicted in the article both supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act, Democratic women nonetheless found the Republican men to be more trustworthy than the Republican women.

To be sure, women are more likely to identify as Democrats than are men—though, as political scientist Barbara Norrander explains, this has more to do with men exiting the Democratic Party over time rather than women entering it. But nevertheless, recent Pew data demonstrate that around 37 percent of women identify as Democrats, and 24 percent are Republicans (the remainder identifies as independent). This indicates that women are hardly confined to just one party. They are, to a large degree, divided across the aisle. And my experiment suggests that women from either party show less potential for rooting compromise in their shared gender identity.

This finding runs contrary to much of what social scientists might predict. Research since at least the 1940s has shown us that rival groups tend to bond over a common identity. For example, Muzafer Sherif famously tackled the question of how two competing groups reconcile. For what became known as the “Robbers Cave Experiment,” Sherif and his coauthors, in the late 1940s through to the early 1950s, transported small groups of boys to a remote area, divided them into two camps, and watched as the two groups developed rivalries before, ultimately, reconciling. The researchers observed that a rivalry could be overcome if the rival groups worked to achieve a superordinate goal that benefited them all. The boys’ competing group identities could become subsumed by an overarching common group identity.

Recent experimental studies have reinforced these findings. Political scientists John Transue employed a survey experiment to demonstrate that emphasizing a “superordinate” identity (that of being American) helps to reduce the social distance between different ethnic groups. In another clever experiment, social psychologist Mark Levine and his coauthors administered a face-to-face experimental study with male soccer fans in Britain. The researchers used an actor to feign injury and manipulated whether or not the injured individual wore a jersey bearing the respondent’s preferred soccer team or the rival soccer team. They found that the soccer fans were more likely to help a fellow soccer fan in crisis. But they furthermore found with a follow-up experiment that they could reduce these biases by encouraging all respondents to think of soccer fans as a superordinate identity that bonds all fans.

Yet the American women who participated in my study showed that sharing a common gender cannot bridge their partisan divide. To the contrary, it appears that their shared gender, and shared interests, in fact exacerbates tension. This is in contrast to men. The male Republicans and male Democrats who participated in my experiment did not express any more hostility towards men from the other party than they did towards women from the other party. (In total, 1,067 American men and women were surveyed from Nov. 4-6, 2013.)

The question is: Why?

To understand this gender difference, we can turn to a field known as identity economics. The economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton suggest that when members of a group see fellow in-group members behaving differently, they respond with negative compensatory actions (like name-calling, stereotyping or fighting). So when women see in-group members (that is, women) aligning themselves with the out-party (Democrats or Republicans), perhaps identity loss kicks in. And this phenomenon may be more pronounced if there are more “women’s issues” to fight over for women than there are “men’s issues” for men.

Research in political science consistently demonstrates that there are additional challenges for women in the political arena. Political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and Nichole Bauer show that female candidates are disproportionately punished for sponsoring negative ads. Political scientists Monica Schneider and Angela Bos find that voters rate female politicians as possessing fewer positive feminine traits as compared with female professional generally, yet they also are viewed as possessing fewer positive masculine traits than male politicians, leaving Schneider and Bos to conclude that “female politicians are defined more by their deficits than their strengths.” We also see important differences in how media cover female candidates—political scientists Johanna Dunaway, Regina Lawrence, Melody Rose and Chris Weber studied 10,000 newspaper articles and concluded that female candidates garner substantially more coverage surrounding personal traits are far less regarding actual policy issues. Given all this, it is perhaps no wonder that, as political scientists Kristin Kanthak and Jonathan Woon recently found, women are significantly more “election-averse” than are men.

Unfortunately, my experiment appears to reveal yet another challenge for women when it comes to politics. There is certainly no reason to expect that female voters will completely abandon their political preferences for the sake of supporting another woman, but it is nonetheless surprising to find that women appear especially hostile to women who identify with the opposing party—even when they agree on an issue. My research only evaluates American women’s attitudes toward female co-partisans—not towards female candidates. But the pattern that emerges from my data is nonetheless troubling for those hoping that American women might band together to overcome the sharp polarization in our politics.

Samara Klar is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy.

Read this article at Politico at Litico