Gendering racialization

ABSTRACT

We extend Michael Tesler’s work on racialization using an intersectional framework to investigate the relationship between racial and gendered systems of power. We demonstrate that gender marginalization can increase scrutiny of women candidates from voters high in racial resentment. We utilize an original survey experiment fielded in December 2019 that leverages President Obama’s close ties to (then) Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton in order to demonstrate that Clinton is penalized more by racially resentment individuals than Biden when both are associated with Obama. This effect exists even when controlling for respondents’ levels of sexism. This suggests that racialization is a gendered process and that views on race and gender are more intricately linked than non-intersectional analyses would predict. Our findings raise questions for what precisely measures pertaining to racial resentment, sexism, and other social attitudes are tapping into when surveying the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• gender
• intersectionality
• elections
• campaigns
• racialization

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The Cronbach’s α for all of the items together is .891, and it is .795, .79, and .747 for the racial resentment, modern sexism, and heterosexism scales, respectively.

2 We conducted the Obama feeling thermometer analyses as a robustness check as well and a series of robustness checks that also look at sexism/racial resentment and Clinton evaluations. We include these figures in the Appendix in order to focus the body of our paper on our specific hypotheses outlined in our theory section.

3 As we allude to previously, while it remains possible that another woman political figure could have a “gendering” effect comparable to the racializing effect of Obama, any such effect is not strong enough for us to detect here or not sufficiently activated by Obama being pictured near Clinton.

4 About 15% of respondents are high (low) in racial resentment and low (high) in sexism, for a total of about 30%. The remaining 60% are split between being high or low in both.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Studies department at Princeton University.