How Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Their Intersections Shape Americans’ Issue Priorities

ABSTRACT

Gender, race, and ethnicity shape the direction of Americans’ policy preferences. Do these traits also affect which issues Americans prioritize? I use open-ended responses about the most important problems facing the country to identify Americans’ policy priorities. I reveal that gender, ethnorace, and their intersections determine which issues Americans view as most important. Women are more likely than men to prioritize problems related to poverty and caregiving, but the specific issues women prioritize are also shaped by their ethnoracial identities. Many “women’s issues” might more accurately be described as Black, Hispanic, or white women’s issue priorities. Additionally, relative to Black and Hispanic men and women, white men and women are particularly unlikely to prioritize problems related to racism and discord, criminal justice, and immigration. On these issues, ethnorace drives prioritization largely unaffected by gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender and politics
• race
• ethnicity
• intersectionality
• public opinion
• American politics
• political priorities

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Caroline Roddey for her outstanding research assistance which contributed immensely to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2021.1971506.

Notes

1. I use the term ethnoracial (Omi and Winant 2014) to characterize identities that may include both racial (e.g., Black or white) and ethnic (e.g., Anglo or Hispanic) components.

2. It is worth noting that this commonly used measure of issue salience combines issue importance and whether issues are considered problems by the public (Jennings and Wlezien 2011; Wlezien 2005). Thus, in this article I am identifying whether different gender-ethnoracial groups consider different issues to be problems of national importance, not simply important issues.

3. Specifically, as displayed in Appendix Tables A.1 and A.2 (online), the median number of topics mentioned by a respondent overall and within each racial and gender group was 3 in both 2012 and 2016, and the mean number of topics mentioned by specific groups ranged from 2.54–2.67 for each group in 2012 and 2.84–2.96 for each group in 2016.

4. More details on the topic categories, examples of each category, and coding are in Appendix Table A.3 (online).

5. Additionally, fewer than 20 respondents identified as a gender other than male or female in the ANES data used here, and access to their gender responses is restricted. Consequently, they are not included in this analysis.

6. Additionally, in most cases, a respondents’ mention of a topic as important does not clearly indicate the direction of their preference on that topic; the question asks only for respondents to identify a most important problem, not the direction or preferred solution. For example, the commonly noted issue of “homelessness” could be identified as a problem because a respondent wants the government to invest in housing for the unhoused, or thinks homeless people need to work harder to get off the streets, or wants them removed from the streets by law enforcement, or wants churches to do more to assist the impoverished. The ideological direction of preference is unclear in this response. This is a common feature of responses to this question in the ANES data. To investigate the direction of respondents’ preferences, I randomly selected 10% of the responses prioritizing each type of issue in my analyses and coded the direction of preference revealed in each response as liberal, conservative, or no clear direction. For five issues, a majority (an average of 69%) of the responses that I coded had no clear direction. In two other cases, nearly half (47% and 49%) of responses demonstrated no clear direction. Only among those who mentioned equality issues as a problem was the direction of preference clear, with 78% of coded responses advocating for greater equality or against inequality. Given this, while “most important problem” responses provide effective evidence of respondents’ priorities, they are not a good source to investigate the direction of respondents’ preferences. Instead, I rely on literature using other data to investigate gender and ethnoracial differences in the direction of people’s preferences (some of which I discuss in the preceding section) to inform expectations about the directional implications of the different priorities I uncover in my analyses.

7. I include these controls because each correlates with ethnorace, gender, or both and may influence respondent’s political priorities. Analyses without these control variables reveal substantively similar findings with generally even stronger effects of gender, ethnorace, and their intersections on political priorities. Details on the coding of these variables are available in Appendix Section B (online).

8. The full results of the logit models used to produce these figures, and pairwise comparisons of these margins at the 95% confidence level for each paired ethnoracial-gender group are displayed in Appendix Section C (online). The graphs in Figures 1–2 display 84% confidence intervals, which is the appropriate level to use so that non-overlapping confidence intervals can be interpreted as indication that the probabilities differ statistically at the 95% confidence level (Belia et al. 2005; Payton, Greenstone, and Schenker 2003; Schenker and Gentleman 2001), as can be verified using the pairwise comparisons in Appendix Section C.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melody Crowder-Meyer

Melody Crowder-Meyeris Assistant Professor of Political Science at Davidson College. Her research investigates inequality in American politics and government, with a particular focus on women in politics, candidate emergence, voter attitudes and behavior, the behavior of political elites, and local politics. Her research has been published in outlets such as Journal of Politics; Political Behavior; Politics & Gender; Politics, Groups, and Identities; and Research & Politics. Website: http://www.melodycrowdermeyer.org/