Resentment of Paternalism as System Change Sentiment: Hostile Sexism Toward Men and Actual Behavior in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

Taking inspiration from Glick and colleagues (2004), this study tested the idea that resentment of paternalism (which is part of the hostile sexism toward men construct) might approximate desire for system change by correlating this variable with actual behavior associated with system change in a single culture. Specifically, voting behavior in the 2008 U.S. presidential election was predicted from political party affiliation, measures of hostile and benevolent sexism toward both women and men, and egalitarian racial attitudes using a U.S. college student sample. Results indicated that the only significant predictors of voting behavior were political party affiliation, resentment of paternalism, and egalitarian racial attitudes. Higher levels of resentment of paternalism were in fact associated with voting for the ticket that represented system change—holding the other predictors constant.

Keywords:

• ambivalent sexism
• attitudes
• gender bias
• paternalism
• voting

Notes

1. These data were collected prior to the development of the two-question assessment of gender categories (see Tate, Ledbetter, & Youssef, 2013), accordingly, the current identity of the transgender participant cannot be determined; nor can any participant's profile as cisgender (i.e., current identity the same as one's birth-assigned gender category) be determined. The use of the two-question method is encouraged for future studies.

2. Including gender in the discriminant function analysis showed that gender difference (as female, male) did not reach the p < .05 cut-off (i.e., p = .058), and including gender did not change the results for any of the significant predictors. Also, recall that all sexism predictors have the respondent gender difference removed to estimate these effects.

3. Glick and colleagues (2004, pp. 723–724) used a simultaneous entry multiple regression strategy to evaluate valence of stereotypes toward men and women (criteria) using the four subscales: hostility toward men, hostility toward women, benevolence toward men and benevolence toward women as predictors. However, the procedure for beta-weight estimation in regression is one that estimates the contribution of each predictor to the least squares line holding the other predictors at their respective mean levels (see Cohen et al., 2003)—it does not remove shared variance. The procedure of residualization removes shared variance between the predictors before estimating their contributions to the outcome. The important point here is that residualizing creates the part of hostility toward men that is not correlated with benevolence toward men, which is similar to the partial correlation strategy reported in Glick and Fiske (1999 pp. 530–532).

4. Statistically removing the gender difference that exists avoids a Type IV error, which can be defined most generally as providing the wrong answer to the right problem—or, more concretely, mis-specifying terms in equations (see Umesh, Peterson, McCann-Nelson, & Vaidyananthan, 1996, for a discussion of Type IV error with interaction terms). If the gender difference remained and the null hypothesis were rejected, the part of hostile sexism toward men that is distinct from benevolence toward men, for example, might only reflect the gender difference itself, in which case a different phenomenon than resentment of paternalism exists. In that case, although the null hypothesis would be correctly rejected (because there is a real relationship), the real reason would be because there is a gender difference in hostility toward men, not something specific to the construct of resentment of paternalism; hence, this term would have been mis-specified in the equation.