Whether it’s a governor of New York, or a former governor of Missouri, an ex-Minnesota Senator, or maybe even a one-time U.S. president, there have been quite a lot of politicians accused of sexual harassment. Although the allegations have been towards candidates from each events, do voters decide them in a different way based mostly upon partisan allegiance?
Stephanie Stark puzzled if this was the case. In accordance with the Washington Month-to-month, “Stephanie Stark, a researcher on sexual assault and harassment in American politics, determined to determine how this might probably be so. She left her job working for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (who later turned embroiled in his personal sexual harassment scandal) and created a examine to look at which sorts of voters could be probably to tolerate candidate allegations of sexual harassment.”
She surveyed greater than 1,000 Democrats and Republicans, giving them a biography of a fictitious candidate, and advised them that this hypothetical candidate for workplace sexually harassed two feminine staffers. Self-identified Republicans within the survey had been advised he was a Republican, whereas these claiming to Democrats had been advised that the fake candidate was a Democrat.
Stark discovered that gender and age made no distinction in how survey respondents evaluated the made-up candidates. However partisanship did. Virtually 60 % of Republicans stated they might be nonetheless prepared to vote for him, even with the allegations. Lower than 40 % of Democrats stated the identical.
“Conservative folks, who clearly are inclined to vote Republican, once they obtain details about one thing that challenges social order or how they consider social cohesion, they wish to reject it,’ Stark stated,” in keeping with the Washington Month-to-month story by Gregory Svirnovskiy.
To see if this was a fluke, I regarded up further analysis in Analysis & Politics by Mia Costa, who’s a professor at Dartmouth School.
She and her college students regarded into the identical topic of their article “How Partisanship and Sexism Affect Voters’ Reactions To Political #MeToo Scandals.”
She and her college students discovered some partisan bias, but additionally discovered that “topics had been extra forgiving of an accused co-partisan legislator than a legislator of the opposing social gathering of their total analysis and their perceptions of punitive repercussions.” However their analysis of candidates from their very own social gathering took successful, simply as a lot as they extra negatively seen somebody from the opposite social gathering.
