Sexism and the Australian voter: how sexist attitudes influenced vote choice in the 2019 federal election

ABSTRACT

While attitudes toward women and gender equality are increasingly salient in Australian politics, little is known about how sexist attitudes shape political behaviour. Using the Australian Election Study, I assess the extent hostile sexism is present among Australian citizens and influenced vote choice in the 2019 Federal election. First, I find that women are less likely than men to hold hostile sexist attitudes, but gender differences vary by party identification. Second, I show that hostile sexism is not significantly related to the likelihood of voting for the Labor or Liberal parties. Hostile sexist attitudes, however, significantly increase the likelihood of voting for the National party and significantly decrease the likelihood of voting for the Greens. Finally, I find no gender difference in the role of hostile sexism in explaining vote choice.

尽管对妇女及两性平等的态度在澳大利亚政治中越来越引人注目，我们对性别主义态度如何形成政治行为却所知甚少。笔者利用澳大利亚选举研究的数据，对公民所具有的性别敌意及其影响2019年联邦选举投票的程度做了评估。首先，笔者发现妇女不像男性那样对异性怀有敌意，不过性别差异因政党认同的差异而有所变化。其次，性别敌意与投工党票还是投自由党票关联并不明显。倒是投国民党的性别敌意明显要多，投绿党的性别敌意明显要少。最后，笔者发现解释投票选择时，性别敌意中并不存在性别差异。

KEYWORDS:

• Voting behaviour
• hostile sexism
• gender gap
• Australian elections
• political parties

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Marija Taflaga, Marian Sawers, Jill Sheppard, Ian McAllister, Ed Handby, Frank Bongiorno, Will Sanders, and Patrick Dumont for their insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Previous investigations of sexism and vote choice have either focus on modern sexism or ambivalent sexism. Modern sexism is an unwillingness to attribute gender inequality to structural obstacles, which is instead attributed to women's choices (Swim et al. 1995). Ambivalent sexism theory posits that sexism is a deeply ambivalent ideology divided between hostile and benevolent orientations (Glick and Fiske 1996). Benevolent sexism is ‘a subjective favourable, chivalrous ideology that offers protection and affection to women who embrace conventional roles’ (p. 109).

2 Franking credits are a tax refund on share dividends and negative gearing is a capital gains tax discount on investments in the property market.

3 The 2019 AES is available online from www.australianelectionstudy.org. The sample size is 2179 respondents for a 42 per cent response rate (Cameron and McAllister 2019).

4 Cronbach's alpha is used to assess the internal consistency of the scale and indicates a relatively high reliability (alpha = 0.8293). Table B1 in the Appendix provides the correlation matrix for all items in the sexism scale.

5 Table A3 in the Appendix provides the complete descriptive statistics for all dependent, independent, and control variables.

6 The controls are selected based on the existing literature on sexist attitudes and vote choice in the United States. See Cassese and Barnes (2019) for instance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katrine Beauregard

Katrine Beauregard is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on gender and political behaviour, women's representation, and gender quotas.