Page:Sexism, racism, and nationalism - Factors associated with the 2016 U.S. presidential election results.pdf/1



RESEARCH ARTICLE

Natalie J. Shook1,2*, Holly N. Fitzgerald1, Shelby T. Boggs1, Cameron G. Ford1, Patricia D. Hopkins1, Nicole M. Silva1

1 West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, United States of America, 2 School of Nursing, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, United States of America


 * [mailto:natalie.shook@uconn.edu natalie.shook@uconn.edu]

OPEN ACCESS

Citation: Shook NJ, Fitzgerald HN, Boggs ST, Ford CG, Hopkins PD, Silva NM (2020) Sexism, racism, and nationalism: Factors associated with the 2016 U.S. presidential election results? PLoS ONE 15(3): e0229432. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229432

Editor: Sean Eric Richey, Georgia State University, UNITED STATES

Received: March 25, 2019

Accepted: February 5, 2020

Published: March 9, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Shook et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability Statement: The data are available on OSF at the following link: https://osf.io/g8w5u/?view_only=2c24da0adedf48289a518c62b52e169a.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.



Abstract
After the generally unexpected outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many explanations were proposed to account for the results. Three narratives that received a considerable amount of media attention were that sexist, racist, and/or nationalist attitudes influenced voting decisions. Some empirical work has supported each of these accounts. However, sexism, racism, and nationalism are interrelated, and most studies about the 2016 election have not examined these three factors in conjunction to determine the unique contribution of each. Thus, we investigated the extent to which each factor (assessed as sexism toward women, Modern Racism, and U.S. nationalism) was uniquely related to evaluations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, voting intentions, and actual voting behavior. Participants completed online questionnaires before (N = 489) and after (N = 192) the 2016 U.S. election. More positive evaluation of Clinton and intentions to vote for Clinton were associated with lower levels of Modern Racism. More positive evaluation of Trump was associated with greater sexism toward women, Modern Racism, and U.S. nationalism. Intent to vote for Trump was associated with greater sexism toward women and Modern Racism. However, only Modern Racism significantly predicted voting behavior. Greater Modern Racism was associated with greater likelihood of voting for Trump and lower likelihood of voting for Clinton. When considered in conjunction, Modern Racism was the most consistent predictor across the different election outcome variables. Sexism toward women and U.S. nationalism were generally not significantly related to evaluations, intentions to vote, or voting behavior when accounting for Modern Racism. Thus, our data indicate that Modern Racism was correlated with vote choice in the 2016 election. 

The 2016 U.S. presidential election was historic, not only because Hillary Clinton was the first female presidential candidate for a major political party, but also because of the generally surprising results. Going into the 2016 U.S. presidential election, most polls projected Hillary Clinton to win the election over Donald Trump. Instead, Trump won the election with 304 PLOS ONE