Abstract
After the generally unexpected outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many explanations were proposed to account for the results. Three narratives that received a considerable amount of media attention were that sexist, racist, and/or nationalist attitudes influenced voting decisions. Some empirical work has supported each of these accounts. However, sexism, racism, and nationalism are interrelated, and most studies about the 2016 election have not examined these three factors in conjunction to determine the unique contribution of each. Thus, we investigated the extent to which each factor (assessed as sexism toward women, Modern Racism, and U.S. nationalism) was uniquely related to evaluations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, voting intentions, and actual voting behavior. Participants completed online questionnaires before (N = 489) and after (N = 192) the 2016 U.S. election. More positive evaluation of Clinton and intentions to vote for Clinton were associated with lower levels of Modern Racism. More positive evaluation of Trump was associated with greater sexism toward women, Modern Racism, and U.S. nationalism. Intent to vote for Trump was associated with greater sexism toward women and Modern Racism. However, only Modern Racism significantly predicted voting behavior. Greater Modern Racism was associated with greater likelihood of voting for Trump and lower likelihood of voting for Clinton. When considered in conjunction, Modern Racism was the most consistent predictor across the different election outcome variables. Sexism toward women and U.S. nationalism were generally not significantly related to evaluations, intentions to vote, or voting behavior when accounting for Modern Racism. Thus, our data indicate that Modern Racism was correlated with vote choice in the 2016 election.
Highlights
With regard to political party affiliation, 39.4% identified as Democrat, 29.6% identified as Republican, 25.1% identified as Independent, 4.2% identified as Libertarian, and 2.6% identified as ‘Other.’ Compared to those who intended to vote, excluded participants were less likely to be White (p < .001) and evaluated Trump and Clinton more positively
The goal of the present study was to determine whether sexism toward women, Modern Racism, or U.S nationalism may have played a role in the 2016 U.S presidential election
The findings indicated that Modern Racism was most consistently related to evaluations of the presidential candidates, voting intentions, and voting behavior
Summary
A total of 489 participants were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk started as a crowdsourcing tool for small tasks, but is widely used for rapid data collection by recruiting larger and diverse research participant pools at relatively inexpensive costs compared to traditional data collection methods [58,59,60]. They were asked to evaluate Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump They were presented with a series of questionnaires in a random order that included the Modern Racism Scale, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, and the Patriotism/Nationalism Questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was utilized to assess the extent to which sexism toward women, Modern Racism, and U.S nationalism were uniquely associated with evaluations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, voting intentions, and voting behavior. Item-level indicators were used to specify latent variables representing Modern Racism, benevolent sexism toward women, hostile sexism toward women, U.S nationalism, and evaluations of Clinton and Trump. Some participants did not fully complete the measures of Modern Racism (1.63%), sexism toward women (6.95%), U.S nationalism (5.93%), or demographic information (13.70%).
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