Example Paper 1: 1

Example PS300 Paper 1

Dr. Chris Stout

PS 300

22 March 2018

The Relationship Between Party Affiliation and Support for the #MeToo Movement

Abstract

In the past year, a number of women have come forward to share their stories of sexual

abuse, assault, and harassment, sparking the #MeToo Movement. While on the surface it may

seem that sexual assault is a bipartisan issue, some components of the #MeToo movement have

been met with hostility. The main aim of this study is to analyze if political party affiliation

affects one’s support for the #MeToo Movement. To collect data, a survey will be conducted

through the crowdsourcing platform ​Mturk. ​The survey will look at a number of demographic

factors (party, race, gender, age etc.) in addition to questions specifically related to the #MeToo

Movement. Due to the current nature of partisan politics and polarization, I expect to see

differing levels of support for the movement between Democrats and Republicans. Since the

#MeToo Movement began as a response to accusations against movie producer Harvey

Weinstein, and is often associated with Hollywood film stars who are considered by many to be

“liberal elites,” I expect Democrats to be more supportive of the movement in comparison to

their Republican counterparts. To test my hypothesis, I conducted chi-square tests, in addition to

a multivariate regression. The results of my tests demonstrated that my hypothesis is correct:

Democrats are more supportive of the #MeToo Movement.

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Introduction

Recently, a number of women have come forward to share their stories of sexual

misconduct, assault, and harassment, particularly in the workplace. The #MeToo Movement

empowers and provides sexual assault and harassment survivors who were once silenced with a

platform to voice their stories. While on the surface the topics encompassed by the #MeToo

Movement may appear to be bipartisan issues supported both by Democrats and Republicans, the

movement to a degree has been met with hostility by critics. This hostility can potentially

undermine the survivors by discrediting their stories.

The main aim of this study is to analyze if party affiliation affects one’s support for the

#MeToo Movement. To determine whether Democrats or Republicans are more supportive of

the movement, I will create a survey that will be conducted using the crowd sourcing platform

Mturk. ​The survey will first ask a number of demographic questions to determine details about

the respondents. Among these demographic details will be gender, race, age, and party

affiliation. Next, respondents will answer specific questions regarding sexual assault,

specifically, “how strongly do you support women sharing their experiences of sexual

assault/speaking out against sexual assault?” Following that, respondents will answer questions

specific to the #MeToo Movement, including “how familiar are you with the #MeToo

Movement?” and “how much do you support the #MeToo Movement?” When the data is

collected, a determination will be made as to whether or not party affiliation impacts one’s

support of the movement.

Given the current nature of partisan politics and polarization, I expect to see differing

support between Democrats and Republicans. Additionally, it can be argued that many

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Republicans have taken a passive approach to addressing sexual assault, primarily because of

their support for Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama Senate Race, in addition to their support of

President Donald Trump, despite his sexual assault allegations. Another example of this is the

Democratic leadership’s response to sexual harassment accusations against Democratic Senator

Al Franken. Franken was ultimately ousted by his own party after being pressured to resign from

his position. Yet, this cannot be said for Republican political leaders accused of the same, or

worse, allegations. It can therefore be inferred that Republicans will be less supportive of the

#MeToo Movement in comparison to their Democratic counterparts.

After conducting chi-square tests and a multivariate regression, I found that the data

supported my hypothesis. Democrats are indeed more supportive of the #MeToo Movement.

However, party affiliation does not affect one’s overall support for women sharing their stories

of sexual assault; nor does it affect one’s familiarity with the #MeToo Movement.

Literature Review

Previous research suggests that party affiliation influences attitudes about women and

gender issues. For example, in a study entitled ​Sex and the Grand Old Party: An Experimental

Investigation of the Effect of a Candidate Sex on Support for a Republican Candidate, ​ David C.

King and Richard E. Matland survey 820 Republican adults to analyze whether or not a

candidate’s sex impacts a Republican voter’s attitudes of a candidate. Each respondent was given

the same description of a hypothetical candidate, but half of the sample was told the candidate

was male, and the other half was told the candidate was female. The survey concluded that being

a woman “hurt” the female Republican candidate, providing her no advantage within her own

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party. In fact, she was seen as “less conservative” and more liberal than the male Republican

candidate with the same description.

In contrast, political independents and Democratic voters were more likely to vote for the

female Republican candidate. This is likely because female Republican politicians are generally

considered to be “more liberal” than their male counterparts due to their gender. This study

demonstrates the point I previously made about the #MeToo Movement. Since #MeToo is

oftentimes viewed as a women’s movement, created by liberal feminists, it is likely to receive

less support from the Republican party in the same way that a female Republican candidate

received less support than a male in the same role.

In addition, there are differing levels of support and varying attitudes in regards to gender

equality from both parties. According to Juliana Horowitz of the ​Pew Research Center, ​69% of

Democrats do not believe the U.S. has gone far enough to address women’s rights, while only

26% of Republicans believe the same statement. In fact, about half of Republicans — 54% —

believe that the current state of gender equality in the U.S. “has been about right.”

These statistics also support my hypothesis in regards to the differing support of the

#MeToo Movement between the two parties. To many Republicans, gender issues are not

relevant, nor a pressing matter in the present day. Therefore many may believe the #MeToo

Movement is unnecessary and pointless. In contrast, Democrats believe more work must be done

to address gender equality, which suggests that they will be far more supportive of the

movement.

Moreover, in a different study by ​Quinnipiac University​, a survey was conducted to

determine whether or not respondents would still consider voting for candidates who have been

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accused of sexual harassment by multiple people. The study found that 48% of Republicans

would still consider voting for such a candidate, while only 10% of Democrats stated the same.

Additionally, 84% of Democrats said they would “definitely not vote” for a candidate with such

allegations, while only 34% of Republicans agreed. These results clearly demonstrate that there

are differing attitudes surrounding sexual assault between the two parties; Democrats seem to be

much more concerned with issues of sexual abuse compared to Republicans. Therefore, it can be

inferred that Democrats will be more supportive of the #MeToo Movement as a whole.

Data and Methods

To answer the question “does party affiliation affect one’s support for the #MeToo

Movement?”, I utilized the crowd sourcing platform ​Mturk ​to conduct a survey. I submitted three

varying questions all relating to women and the #MeToo Movement. The purpose of the first two

questions were to grasp a sense of how familiar the respondents were with the topic, and whether

or not the label of the movement ultimately impacted the ways in which the respondents viewed

sexual assault and harassment. The first question asked “how strongly do you support women

sharing their experiences of sexual assault/speaking out against sexual assault?” and gave the

respondents a sliding scale in which to respond, ranging from 1 (strongly support) to 5 (strongly

oppose). The second question asked the respondents, “how familiar are you with the #MeToo

Movement?” ranging from 1 (extremely familiar) to 5 (not familiar at all). The third question,

and one that pertains directly to my research question and hypothesis is, “how much do you

support the #MeToo Movement?” Respondents rated their support on a negative scale by

selecting 1 (a great deal), 2 (a lot), 3 (a moderate amount), 4 (a little), and 5 (not at all).

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The ​Mturk ​survey also asked a number of demographic questions regarding gender, race

and age, in addition to my independent variable of interest, party affiliation. For the purposes of

this study, I will be focusing only on Democrats and Republicans; Independents will not be taken

into account during my chi-square tests. However, Independents will be used as my omitted

comparison category during my multivariate regression.

Ultimately, my null hypothesis is that there is no relationship between party affiliation

(my independent variable) and support for the #MeToo Movement (my dependent variable). In

contrast, my alternate hypothesis is that Democrats will be more supportive of the #MeToo

Movement.

Since party affiliation is a nominal variable — meaning the variables are categorical and

not arranged in a particular order — I will be conducting a chi-square test to determine whether or

not to reject or accept my null hypothesis. Additionally, I will be conducting a multivariate

regression to account for three control variables which may influence the relationship between

party and support for the #MeToo Movement: gender, race, and age. Since the #MeToo

Movement is generally considered to be a female-focused and feminist movement, women may

be more supportive of the movement in comparison to men. Additionally, if my alternate

hypothesis is correct, and party affiliation does impact one’s support for the movement, race may

potentially play a role, since minorities tend to be more liberal. And lastly, since the #MeToo

Movement has had a significant presence on social media, age may impact one’s support for the

movement. Younger people may be more exposed to #MeToo, and therefore may be more

supportive of it. Party affiliation will also be included in the regression.

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Before I conducted my chi-square tests, I had to recode “party,” since “independent” and

“other” were also included in the survey. Therefore, I recoded in Stata so both “democrat” and

“republican” were equal to 1, and “independent” and “other” were equal to 0.

Results

From the first chi-square test ( ​Figure 1​), I was able to determine that there is a significant

relationship between party affiliation and support for the #MeToo Movement. The P-Value is

equal to 0.032, which is less than .05. Because of this, we reject the null and assume there is a

significant relationship between party affiliation and one’s support for the movement. It can be

determined from this chi-square test that more Democrats (represented by “1” in ​Figure 1 ​)

supported the movement “a great deal” or “a lot” in comparison to their Republican counterparts

(represented by “0” in ​Figure 1 ​).

Figure 1: Chi-Square Test Figure 2: Chi-Square Test

(Support for the #MeToo Movement) (Support for Women Speaking Out)

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Furthermore, I conducted a chi-square test for the variable “womenspeakout” to

determine whether Democrats are more supportive of women speaking out about sexual assault

and harassment issues in general. For this test, the null hypothesis is that there is no relationship

between party affiliation and support for women speaking out, and the alternate hypothesis is

that Democrats will be more supportive of women speaking out. According to this chi-square test

(​Figure 2 ​), it can be determined that there is not a significant relationship between party

affiliation and support for women speaking out (0.546 > .05); therefore, we accept the null

hypothesis. This is likely due to the fact that this question was not specifically associated with

the #MeToo Movement. It suggests that while Republicans may support women speaking out,

they may not support the actual movement.

Lastly, I conducted a chi-square test for the variable “metoofamiliar” to see if there is any

variance in familiarity of the movement between both parties. For this test, the null hypothesis is

that there is no relationship between party and the degree to which one is familiar with the

#MeToo Movement, and the alternate hypothesis is that Democrats will be more familiar with

the movement. According to this chi-square test (​Figure 3 ​), it is clear that there is no relationship

between party and familiarity of the movement. The P-value is more than .05, so we reject the

alternate hypothesis and accept the null.

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Figure 3: Chi-Square Test

(Familiarity of the #MeToo Movement)

Furthermore, the multivariate regression I conducted (​Figure 4 ​) reveals that after

controlling for gender, race, and age, there is still a significant relationship (at .05) between the

Democratic party and support for the #MeToo Movement. Therefore, there is still support for my

alternate hypothesis. Additionally, the adjusted R-squared value is equal to 0.1724, which means

there is a 17% variation in the dependent variable “metoosupport” as explained by my

independent variables. Although gender was marginally significant (0.065), aside from

“democrat,” none of my independent variables were statistically significant predictors of my

dependent variable. Moreover, in this regression, political independents serve as the omitted

comparison. Therefore, the “democrat” coefficient (-1.0292) suggests that on a 5-point scale,

Democrats are on average 1.02 points more supportive of the #MeToo Movement in comparison

political independents.

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Figure 4: Multivariate Regression

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that party affiliation has a significant impact on one’s level of

support for the #MeToo Movement, and the chi-square tests I have conducted and the data I have

collected confirms this hypothesis. Democrats tend to be more supportive of the #MeToo

Movement. However, party affiliation does not impact one’s familiarity of the movement or

support for women speaking out against sexual assault in general, which suggests that it is

simply the label of “#MeToo” that may deter many Republicans from supporting the movement.

Additionally, there may be some social desirability bias at play; when respondents are asked

whether or not they support women, the socially desirable answer is yes. However, when masked

by the label of the movement, I saw different results in which those who supported the notion of

women speaking out were ironically less supportive of the movement that encourages women to

do so.

I believe this is largely due to a number factors, many of which I discussed in the

introduction. #MeToo is oftentimes viewed as a “liberal” movement, and the majority of

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Republicans have taken a passive approach to addressing sexual assault. Arguably, these results

have a number of implications. When the #MeToo Movement becomes labeled as a liberal

campaign, it undermines the survivors of sexual assault and ultimately discredits their stories.

Furthermore, a partisan divide hinders the nation’s ability to truly tackle the issue of sexual

assault and harassment in an effective way.

While this study did support my hypothesis, there are a number of ways in which this

project could be more accurately conducted in the future. For example, there are several

downsides of administering the survey through ​Mturk. ​It is a select population rather than a truly

random sample. Consequently, the respondents are not representative of the population as a

whole. Therefore, to improve this study and better support my hypothesis, a nationwide survey

could be administered. Doing so would ensure that the data and results I have collected are truly

applicable to the nation as a whole.

Works Cited

Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, et al. “Wide Partisan Gaps in U.S. Over How Far the Country Has

Come on Gender Equality.” ​Pew Research Center​, 18 Oct. 2017.

King, David C., and Richard E. Matland. “Sex and the Grand Old Party.” ​American Politics

Research​, 2003, pp. 595–612.

Quinnipiac University. “American Voters Have Few Kind Words for Trump, Quinnipiac

University Polls Finds; Expel Moore If He Wins, Voters Say Almost 2-1.” ​Quinnipiac

University/Poll​, 12 Dec. 2017.