Implicit Sources of Sexism in Contemporary American Electoral Politics ...

It is known that the gender of candidates running for high levels of national office influences election outcomes more so than at lower levels, similar to the way in which women are advancing as middle managers but not as CEOs. Yet, the extent to which gender remains a barrier for candidates running for presidential office in contemporary American electoral politics is unknown. Understanding how gender bias, both conscious and unconscious, influences voting behavior is of crucial significance, as it has the potential to inform public policy by providing opportunities for rethinking and redefining the standards by which men and women are considered as presidential candidates by the American electorate.The 2016 presidential election can be treated as a natural case study to explore the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by sexism, both conscious (explicit) and unconscious (implicit) among voters. This study uses survey data to explore this possibility using measures of both ... : The primary aim of this research is to explore if an implicit measure of sexism predicted vote choice for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election above and beyond the explicit measure. To compare implicit and explicit measures, this study added an abbreviated version of the Gender-Leadership Implicit Association Test to the second wave of the Cooperative Election Study (CES) that was fielded post-election in November 2017. Including an implicit measure of sexism is built on the premise that people might be unwilling to report sexist attitudes if asked to do so directly in a survey. Implicit measures do not rely on the honesty or accuracy of people’s answers to sensitive questions and, therefore, avoid social desirability bias. ...