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By Harold Clarke and Marianne Stewart By Harold Clarke and Marianne Stewart June 12

On May 2, during the Women for Women Internationals annual luncheon,CNNs Christiane Amanpourasked Hillary Clinton whether misogyny contributed to her defeat in the 2016 presidential election. The Democratic nominee replied: Yes. I do think that it played a role. On May 31, Clinton reiterated the claim in a widely publicized interview at Recodes Code Conference 2017 event.

In making this claim, Clinton asserted what many political commentators, and no doubt millions of Americans also believe: Negative attitudes toward women affected voters in 2016, and the impact of these attitudes influenced the outcome of the election.

We bring fresh data, and a surprising finding, to this topic.

In the fall of 2016, we asked six questions about the role and status of women on a national survey called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Respondents could agree or disagree with these six statements:

These questions are intended to capture whether survey respondents have progressive or traditionalist attitudes toward womens roles and statuses, without any reference to Clinton, Donald Trump, political parties or the election.

As the graph below shows, for the most part, progressive attitudes are more prevalent than traditionalist ones, but sizable minorities of those answering the survey expressed traditionalist attitudes, especially among men.

But even after accounting for other factors, attitudes toward womens roles were still correlated with how people voted. For example, if we imagine that the index runs from zero(most progressive) to 100 (most traditional) the average voter scores roughly a 40. Holding other factors equal, a shift from a relatively progressive position (20) to a relatively traditional position (60) would reduce the chance of voting for Clinton from 57percent to 17 percent. The finding is robust the impact of attitudes toward womens roles was consistent in statistical models with many different combinations of factors that might influence how people voted.

One interesting question is whether attitudes about womens roles were more strongly related to the votes of men or women. We didnt find evidence of any difference. These attitudes mattered similarly for both men and women.

Another important question is whether attitudes about womens roles mattered more in 2016 than in 2012? If so, this suggests that there really was something distinctive about 2016, when a female candidate ran against a male candidate who had made many crude comments about women.

The 2016 CCES asked respondents whether they supported Obama or Romney in 2012. If we apply the same statistical model to peoples 2012 vote choice, we find that attitudes toward women did not have a meaningful association with whether people supported Obama and Romney, despite the Obama campaigns attacks on Romney and Republicans for waging a war on women. Attitudes toward womens roles and statuses did not have the same traction in 2012 that they did in 2016.

In short, our analysis suggests that Hillary Clinton is correct: Attitudes toward womens roles and statuses influenced presidential voting in 2016. If fewer voters had held traditionalist attitudes toward womens roles and statuses, Clintons national popular vote total (already a plurality) would have increased. Even small shifts in these attitudes could have affected the outcomes in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Clinton lost by an average of only 0.57percent.

That said, there is another important implication of our findings one more surprising and actually more favorable to the Clinton campaign. Our survey clearly shows that attitudes toward womens roles and statuses were tilted in a progressive direction, so the salience of womens roles in voter decision-making likely helped Clinton more than it hurt her. She had more votes to gain from people with progressive attitudes than she had votes to lose from those with traditionalist views.

Thus, playing what some observers might call the woman card may have been good politics for Clinton in 2016 even if it was not enough to bring her to the White House.

Harold Clarke and Marianne Stewart are professors in the school of economic, political and policy sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Link:
How attitudes about gender may have helped Hillary Clinton in 2016 ... - Washington Post