Could We Ever Understand How Gender Influences Voters?

[Ricardo] Recording? Okay. Welcome to “Could We Ever,” part of the –

[Danyelle] Welcome to “Could We Ever,” part of the UT Dallas CometCast network.

[Ricardo] Could We Ever shines a light on our experts and ask them to tackle questions you never knew you needed answered.

[Danyelle] From science to art and more.

[Clip of Selina Meyer] As a woman, I believe- no no no no no no, I can’t identify myself as a woman. People can’t know that. Men hate that and women who hate women hate that, which I believe is most women. Don’t you agree with that? Yes.

[Danyelle] The clip you heard was Selina Meyer of HBO show, Veep, and today we’re discussing how voters view female candidates with Dr. Harold Clark, Ash Bell Smith professor of political science.

[Ricardo] Hello, welcome to the show Dr. Clark. Thanks for joining us.

[Dr. Clark] Well I’m happy-happy to talk with you.

[Danyelle] First off, we wanted to talk a little bit about a candidate’s gender and how it may influence voters and we know that you do research in this area, so can you give us a quick, brief overview of the research that you’ve done on this topic.

[Dr. Clark] Yeah. I think that it’s an it’s an interesting and interesting topic and uh we’ve done a few things on this recently. What got us going first was the 2016 uh presidential election, where of course we had Hillary Clinton as a candidate. The first you know the first woman uh candidate you know for a major political party for the presidency. Of course, although, she ended up with more popular votes than Donald Trump, she lost the election because she didn’t get enough votes in the Electoral College and after the election of course she had a number of explanations about why she lost and uh one of them was that people just didn’t want it you know didn’t want a woman candidate. There were enough people out there who were misogynistic, if you will, with regard to a woman candidate. You know we started investigating this using survey data from a very large project called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which interviews about 60,000 people before and then immediately after an election. You know a nation-you know national sample and so we use those data to uh you know to investigate this, and uh you know it’s very, it’s very interesting. We included in our, you know, in the questions for the survey, we had a set or what they call a battery of questions, concerning people’s attitudes towards uh you know women and sort of women’s roles and statuses in the economy and society. Uh you know questions really didn’t have anything to do on their face with politics but with you know but they’re rather focused on women’s roles and in the economy and so forth, and though, you know the answers to those questions, we took those answers and you know made up a little scale from a measure of people’s overall attitudes towards women and we found that that variable had you know really strong effects on how people-how people voted in the election. You know controlling statistically for all sorts of other factors that political scientists normally use when they’re when they’re studying voting in elections. So you know that was uh, we thought was a very interesting, it’s a very interesting finding, and so that’s what really got us started with this.

[Danyelle] And so what were the findings? So you, you said that you guys took all of this data and tried to determine what the perceptions were. Was it misogyny-

[Dr. Clark] Yeah.

[Danyelle] -or was there something else at play?

[Dr. Clark] Well yeah, I-I think you know, the sort of the answer to that question really there are a couple of parts, and this is an important point about studying voting elections more generally. At the individual level, in terms of the individual, you know the individual voters political psychology, as said there was a strong, you know a strong effect and people who were you know everything else controls statistically you know people’s partisan affiliations, their attitudes towards issues, all sorts of other things that we normally bring into these kinds of statistical analyses. If you had a, what we would call a you know, a traditional view of the role of women that you know had a strong and significant effect you know in the direction of pushing people towards voting for Donald Trump rather than voting for Hillary Clinton and vice versa. People had what we might call it, you know more modern or progressive view of women’s roles that pushed you in the direction of voting for Clinton rather than Trump. Now having said that the individual level it’s important to recognize so that somewhere around 70 to 75 percent of the people that we interviewed and the thousands of them as I said had for you know all over the country had had more progressive rather than traditional views, so Hillary was actually you know, by you know with this issue you know she tried to make this an issue actually during the campaign that and she was right to do so because she was basically going to get three votes for everyone she lost. So viewed from that perspective having a woman candidate making an issue of her gender was actually beneficial to her, she would gain more than she would lose, so she was right to complain after the election at the individual level. I mean if everybody in the electorate had had a progressive view, she undoubtedly would have won, but uh um nevertheless, she was getting a lot more votes and she was losing when this issue was as we say by priming this issue she was actually helping herself and of course she recognized this during the campaign and so you know it’s a little disingenuous after the election to say that this is what you know I really cost her. She was getting more than she lost from this, but nevertheless she was right at the level of individual level uh you know uh voter psychology. So that’s an important distinction to make.

[Ricardo] What do you think shaped these perceptions and voters?

[Dr. Clark] Yeah, yeah. That’s an interesting question because these attitudes you know towards women as we said, we’re not point, they were not politicized if you looked at the questions on you know just answering them, there’s really nothing to do with politics per se. So it’s unlikely that these were attitudes that were shaped in the short run you know, by you know by the election per se or these particular candidates and I think that’s a good question people have broader you know sort of a broader views of things not you know. I-I suppose one of the clearest kinds of you know sort of analogies or similarities might be with people’s attitudes you know sort of towards different ethnic groups or different racial groups. There’s-there’s a long literature in psychology you know about these kinds of topics and it may well be that you know these attitudes towards women are you know shaped by fairly deep kinds of uh personality forces and so forth. It’s not something that we investigated per se, but it is important I think to note that it’s not just that you know, it’s it’s you know, that there are lots of women who have traditional views of the roles of women as well. It’s not just another way of saying you know all the women voted for Trump or voted for Clinton and the men voted for Trump or something like that. That’s-that’s not that’s not the case at all so you know people’s attitudes towards women’s roles and statuses cuts across you know gender per se. Well we were talking earlier about women’s roles and statuses, we’re talking about in terms of their roles like what’s sort of appropriate uh, you know things for women to do or things that are not appropriate for them to do in terms of occupations and in terms of you know political positions and so on and so forth. Uh economic leadership, political leadership and so forth, the notion of status we usually, you know historically uh think about statuses in terms of a hierarchy in society, whether it be defined in terms of income, you know wealth or power. Sort of where-where our women are or where they should be in terms of these sort of ladders of wealth, status and power you know. Is it appropriate for-is it appropriate to have a woman, you know leading the country as a whole? Is it appropriate to have women in senior positions, in major, you know economic enterprises and firms? You know just what kinds of-what kinds of positions are appropriate? What-what kinds of statuses are appropriate for them and of course you know this is very it’s very obviously important, one would think for how people would view women as candidates for for important political positions. You know generally, let alone for the presidency so that’s what we’re talking about in terms of statuses.

[Ricardo] So do you think that it’s kind of like a generational thing? Do you think this generation, this coming generation is getting maybe better at that or more equal?

[Dr. Clark] I think there’s probably some generational, you know again the correlations are not overwhelmingly strong but I do think you know if you looked at some of the demographics of the attitudes towards women, there are some generational differences with older people being more traditional than younger people, but it’s not you know it’s not overwhelmingly strong again. It’s not just saying all the young people are very progressive. That’s not true, that’s certainly not true. Education plays a role as well and so more well-educated people tend to be more progressive in these matters and less well-educated tend to be more traditional, but there’s you know, there’s lots of people on both sides of the educational divide as well.

[Danyelle] You said that the the generational difference wasn’t a strong correlation. Were there any other strong correlations besides education? Were there any to do with income or ethnic background or anything else?

[Dr. Clark] Yeah, we didn’t do-didn’t do a lot of work and sort of going back we sort of took as our our our mission to you know to see the impact of these attitudes on voting and the in the election itself as I said, but uh there’s some fairly predictable kinds of correlations, with age younger people being more progressive, you know well-educated people being more progressive, and you know people, you know people in ethnic minorities actually being-let you know, being more traditional in their, in their attitudes and less, you know, a higher income people being more progressive and so forth, but again most of these correlations are pretty, are pretty modest you know. You’re not going to explain these attitudes just in terms of the demographic characteristics of the people. So I said I think other factors including, you know personality characteristics and so forth are-are at play here, but it’s a really interesting line of research and certainly a very good idea for going forward looking-looking more at this in the future.

[Danyelle] And have you all done any research for any other elections or political situations, besides just the 2016 election? We were wondering if there was any-any changes that have happened historically with people’s perceptions of men versus women candidates. I mean the UK had a female prime minister back in the 80s with Margaret Thatcher, and you know there’s many other developed nations in the world that have female leadership, so like what, you know what is it about women that for so long historically has been an issue? Or is it something specific to the States?

[Dr. Clark] That’s a really good question because Margaret Thatcher was first elected as prime minister of Great Britain in May of 1979, and served as as prime minister of Britain continuously all the way through to November of 1990. So that’s a long time, and she won three-three general elections and that’s a long time ago and you know many other countries have had female leaders. Angela Merkel for example in Germany is a notable sort of long tenured example. Right now, Canada, where I’m from originally, had a woman prime minister for a short period back in 1993. So you know the United States has, you know has never had, you know a woman president yet and it’s not going to have one in 2020 either. We’re pretty sure-pretty sure, but um in terms of our own research on women candidates, one of the things we’ve been doing recently, we’re actually just finishing up this, uh you know a report on this research right now, is taking a look at the 2018 congressional elections using again, the CCES data, which are really good because we can actually do statistical analyses at the level of the congressional district all across the country, and as you may know in-in 2018, we had the largest number of women candidates ever in history for congressional elections. Most of these candidates were Democrats, some were-some were Republicans, and so we could actually do what they call multi-level modeling. We could actually look at the impact of having a woman candidates, you know in different combinations of Democrats and Republicans all across the country, and see whether that had an influence on how people voted in the congressional election. You know again controlling statistically for all the other kinds of things that influences people-to influence people’s intellectual choices and so we’re just finishing up that research right now.
[Danyelle] Are there any preliminary findings you can tell us or is that off limits?

[Dr. Clark] Sure, no no no not not at all. You know carrying on with this, we find there are two kinds-there are two kinds of effects that we-that we-that we see. Again as in 2016, we’ve got questions about people’s attitudes towards women’s roles and statuses which is I said var-you know varies from one person to another. A veri-you know, there’s variation to some extent between uh men and women, but you know people in every demographic group vary in their attitudes towards-towards women’s roles and statuses, so we can we can see an individual level affect congressional voting but more than that, the candidate, the gender of the candidate is, it’s a focus of attention in this research and there are two kinds of effects here. One is simp– you know, just simply whether the different combinations of Democrat and Republican candidates by gender makes a difference to how people voted, controlling for everything else, and the answer to that is, yes. Everything else equal, people are going to, whether they’re, you know, they’re less likely to vote in particular for a Democratic candidate, if that candidate is a woman rather than a man and it’s the difference. So I had hastened to say circa 2018 was not huge. It’s statistically significant, but you know it’s a quite a modest-quite a modest effect, so there’s some disadvantage to being a woman candidate, particularly you know if you’re a Democrat, but not-not that much. Now it would be great to see what it was like back in the 80s or the 70s, you know 50 years ago, but unfortunately we don’t have the kind of data resources. We need to-to study that. The other thing though with our 2018 data is that the can-the gender of the candidate interacts, that has what we call statistically a cross-level interaction with people’s attitudes towards uh women’s roles and statuses. So if you’re a woman candidate, and you-you know voters with progress-or there’s a woman candidate and you have progressive attitudes towards women, this makes it more likely that you’re going to vote for that woman candidate. So there’s this interaction of the gender of the candidate with your attitudes towards the roles of women in society, and it works in a predictable way. So there are two effects then of candidate gender, one is this sort of general overall effect of lessening the likelihood of voting for-for that candidate but that’s offset to some extent or perhaps completely by the, uh you know what we call this cross-level interaction. And so as I said more-more people tend to be progressive their attitudes than traditional, so on balance you know, this is not all that bad-all that bad for a woman candidate and so the effects, uh circa 2018 congressional election were pretty modest. Some disadvantage, modest disadvantage for women but really not very much anymore.

[Danyelle] So you said that you don’t think there’s quite as much as a disadvantage for women candidates. So do you think in 2024, would it be reasonable for us to have a female president?

[Dr. Clark] Sure. Absolutely. The effects, you know, to the extent that we could generalize, these, can, you know, these, uh results from the 2018 congressional, uh elections,
it would seem you know those barriers for for a woman would would certainly not be insurmountable, and as I said the 2016 uh data show that, you know, you know a majority of the people have pretty progressive attitudes towards women more generally, and so this would be you know an advantage for for for a woman candidate. This is not going to happen, it’s not going to hurt them. So I think, yeah, I think my, you know, my judgment would be based on the studies we’ve done that there’s no- there’s no reason at all, and of course in 2016, we have to remember that, you know, we would have President Clinton right now if it hadn’t been for very small variations in-in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She lost those three states by less than just over one half of one percent of the vote, so yeah, and she won the popular vote of course across the country as a whole by about two million votes. So it was very close, a very closely fought thing then, and so I think there you know there’s no reason to believe that we could not have a woman, you know, a successful woman candidate in 2024.

[Danyelle] So, you mentioned that throughout her presidential campaign, Hillary highlighted some of the things that she considered to be hurdles for herself. Have those the hurdles that Hillary brought up, were they the same hurdles that women have said that they’ve faced in the past or are things better?

[Dr. Clark] Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. I think that’s that’s right. She did more after, like she really made you know recognize. I’m sure they had their own public opinion goals and every you know their own internal polling, and it’s showing that most people are you know we’re favorable towards, uh towards women they’re not taking, you know, taking a major roles in the economy and society and politics and so forth. So for her to to leave, well of course Trump was a very easy target, you know, to try to take political advantage of this was a smart thing for her to do. She was priming an issue where people were sympathetic to to her case, and then though as I said after she lost, she blamed that minority who were not sympathetic to her and, you know, and claimed that they were that they were misogynists and so forth. So it’s really sort of a two-edged-two-edged sword but she was on the right track, Trump was an easy target and she had a generally sympathetic audience across the country. So, she wasn’t doing, you know, if I was advising her politically I would have said the same thing, you’re not going to lose you know as much as you gain on this, so, especially with a candidate like Trump, who had a history, you know, of-of misogynist comments and so forth, and so he, you know, whether that, I don’t think that’s likely to be repeated again in 2024. That was fairly-fairly, you know, a unique kind of circumstance, but anyway that’s that’s my take on it.

[Ricardo] What do you think about Kamala Harris being named as a vice presidential candidate? Do you think-what is the history of vice presidents that are female?

[Dr. Clark] Yeah, the first thing to say is, uh you know, generally but you have people’s attitudes towards vice presidents don’t make much difference really to how they vote in the end. There’s the-the overall consensus seems to be that doesn’t really, it doesn’t really matter very much. You know, the couple, we’ve had a couple of candidates in the past for vice president who have been women, most recently Sarah Palin back, you know, back in 2008 and she was a pretty weak candidate. It wasn’t because she was a woman, she was an experienced candidate. Kamala Harris, I don’t think it’s going to matter that she’s a woman. I think more important will be her, you know, her political, you know, sort of standing, where she is, and of course the republicans right now are are going, it’s pretty clear they’re going to paint her as a very radical, a very radical person and probably attack her on her personality, as a pretty nasty person as well, and who knows whether they’ll be successful or not, but you know they’ve got a lot of tape of her attacking Joe Biden pretty strongly a few months ago. They’ve got a lot of tape from the Kavanaugh hearings, the Supreme Court and so on. So, this, it’s going to be it’s going to be a pretty nasty race, I think with regard to, you know, with regard to her candidacy but it’s not going to be because she’s a woman. It’s not going to be that at all I don’t think, and so we’ll see but no she’s a pretty controversial pick. Biden said he wanted to pick a minority female and so he went, you know, who has been hesitating on this as we know for quite a while. There’ve been a number of candidates. He settled on her in the end and so we’ll we’ll see how it goes, but she’s a, she, I think she’ll be a pretty controversial candidate, but not because of her gender.

[Danyelle] That’s interesting. I wonder, I wonder if you have any thoughts on a younger candidate, like, you know, JFK was pretty young when he ran, so he didn’t have quite-he didn’t have quite the same political history that even someone like Kamala Harris has because she’s older than JFK was when he ran, do you think that we could ever have a younger woman president?

[Dr. Clark] Well, I think that that’s you know quite possible, you know, JFK was of course very young when he became president and, you know, there’s no reason in principle that we might not have a younger woman candidate. One thing about this election, I think it will mark a sort of changing of the guard, after all, you know, as I said Biden is very elderly. He’s like 78 years old and Trump is no spring chicken either. He is in his mid 70s and I think we’re going to see a change of wealth, a new generation. That may well be one of the themes and, you know, in ,you know, national politics going forward will be its time for a new generation of leadership, and there’s no reason I don’t I don’t think that you know a woman candidate couldn’t benefit from that, just like just like a man a man might.

[Danyelle] What kind of research would you want to see done, based on what other factors may influence voters? If you’re saying that, now the tides have changed and society is a little bit more progressive and doesn’t view gender as such a large factor as they may have in the past, what do you think are some other factors that might affect voters this year or in future elections?

[Dr. Clark] But one thing. I hase-hasten to add right now too, we’re talking about the 2020 elections coming up, you know, we’re really in unprecedented sort of times now, with the COVID pandemic and this, I mean it’s had enormous effects, not just on health but on the economy and people’s attitudes, their psychology and so forth. So it’s-it’s really it’s really an unusual situation, and uh very very much certainly in, you know, in our lifetime, we’ve never seen anything like this before and I’ve been around a long time and this is extraordinary. So, you know, we may see some things this year that that really surprises because of the context we’re in. Well, I think always a place to begin, you know, with factors that influence both voting and election outcomes are are what we, you know, what political scientists call valence issues, the v-a-l-e-n-c-e issues. These these are issues like the economy, uh health care, uh national and personal security, uh where everybody basically agrees on the ends of public policy and the you know the questions and the political debate. The controversy concerns not what, you know, you know, what the goals of policy are, but rather how should we do it and who’s who’s best able, especially, who’s best able to do it, and as as I said just a moment ago, we’re in a situation now where the economy is, not only in the United States, but of course around the world, now have just crashed deeply because of the COVID pandemic and all the lock-down orders and things like this, as we all know. So that, you know, this is going to be a big a big deal and undoubtedly the economy is going to be a big deal in the American election this Fall, and you know going forward, it’s it’s a huge, it’s really a huge issue around the world. We’ve got conditions potentially that none of us have seen in our lifetime, that our parents, grandparents might recall from when they were were children during the great depression, and so forth, uh like, my parents were, you know, this is really the place to begin and to tie this together with gender, one of the things to note is that both men and women you know evaluate the economy very similarly, the effects of the of economic conditions on how they behave politically are very similar as well, and research we’ve done a time, so-called time series analysis research going all the way back to, with monthly data, all the way back to the 70s. You know, underscore this point, and so it’s not going to be the case that it’s just the women who might be affected by the economic turn-down. Men certainly will be as well, and this is going to be a bit, this is a big factor.

[Ricardo] What’s next for your research?

[Dr. Clark] I would just add a couple things about going forward, we are going to be working with the cooperative congressional election study team again this year and doing question, you know, with their survey, but we also have a new survey with national survey, a pre and post election project, that we’re doing at UTD and this is being funded by the university and so, that, this is going to be a large national survey that we do and so that’s going to be really interesting too. So we’re going to have a lot of interesting data from these two projects this Fall and, and so it’s, you know, it’s it’s going, we’ll we’ll know a lot more in terms of answering the kinds of questions that you’re posing now, of course, you know, soon after the election. We’re going to have some really really interesting data to help you know sort of answer these questions uh you know going forward.

[Ricardo] Could we ever understand how gender influences voters?

[Dr. Clark] Yes, well I think we do. I think I think we’ve got a very good handle already, in terms of, how people, there’s a distinct as I say, you know, people how they, how they react to women in economy and society generally has has an important effect on how they view women in the political world. So I think, we’ve got a pretty good idea about that already. and as I said we’re also seeing that, you know, this interacts with the the presence or absence of women candidates in predictable ways. So I think, I think we’re well on our way to understanding, you know, how these things work.

[Danyelle] Thank you so much!

[Dr. Clark] And thanks for the opportunity. Bye bye folks. [Ricardo] Thanks again to Dr. Clark for joining the show. If you like what you heard, feel free to leave a review. Until we talk next time, whoosh! The UT Dallas CometCast is a podcast network brought to you by the UTD Office of Communications.

[Danyelle] A special thanks to senior lecturer, Roxanne Minnish, for our music. Be sure to follow the university on social media and check out Could We Ever and our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. So listen out for us next time.