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      How partisanship and sexism influence voters’ reactions to political #MeToo scandals

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          Abstract

          Influential theories of motivated reasoning, as well as real-world anecdotal examples, would suggest that voters do not always penalize legislators from their own party for alleged immoral behavior, such as sexual harassment. But very little empirical evidence exists on how voters react to sexual misconduct allegations, especially since the start of the #MeToo movement. We examine how partisanship and sexist attitudes shape individuals’ reactions to sexual harassment allegations about a politician. Using a pretest–posttest online experiment, we randomize both the party affiliation of the accused legislator as well as the severity of the allegations. Overall, we find some evidence of partisan bias, but that there may be a limit. Subjects were more forgiving of an accused co-partisan legislator than a legislator of the opposing party in their overall evaluation and their perceptions of punitive repercussions, but their levels of electoral support decreased just as much for co-partisans as they did for opposing partisans. Importantly, these reactions are strongly conditioned by sexism; as subjects’ levels of sexism increase, the otherwise large and negative effect of allegations on evaluations of favorability and electoral support disappears.

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          Most cited references22

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          The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism.

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            A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo

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              Uncivil Agreement

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Research & Politics
                Research & Politics
                SAGE Publications
                2053-1680
                2053-1680
                July 2020
                July 17 2020
                July 2020
                : 7
                : 3
                : 205316802094172
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Dartmouth College, USA
                Article
                10.1177/2053168020941727
                4ac4163c-1a20-4a9b-8a2c-2f95d4a8c914
                © 2020

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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