The constellation of political developments in the United States over the past decade – from the election of Trump by a majority of white women voters, to the advance of state-level restrictions on abortion – reflect a resurgence in efforts to support gender and racial hierarchies. In this paper, we theorize the central role of a patriarchal worldview in these developments. Building on extant gender scholarship and system justification theory, we define patriarchal worldview as a politicized orientation that relies on complementary gender stereotypes as a mechanism for justifying patriarchy as a system of social organization. Drawing further on intersectionality, racial hierarchy scholarship, and psychosocial theory, we demonstrate variation in the relationship between patriarchal worldview and anti-abortion attitudes based on race-gender positionality. Taken as a whole, our study offers a proof of concept for patriarchal worldview and a case study of its consequences for abortion opposition in the United States.
Systematic variation in public opinion about the insurrection on January 6, 2021 follows more than just party lines, and while differences between Republicans and Democrats are most obvious, partisanship reflects only the tip of the iceberg. Going beyond party, we focus on the interaction between gender and race and the relationship to approval or disapproval of the actions of Donald Trump and his followers at the Capitol insurrection. In contrast to the notion that women – characterized as primarily Democratic voters and supporters of peaceful activism – are less supportive of the insurrection, our analysis of CMPS 2020 data demonstrate that white women do not meet this expectation. Instead, it is race and ethnicity that animate larger differences in opinion on January 6th, with white women among the most supportive of the insurrection. Utilizing a race-gendered intersectional methodology and data from the 2020 CMPS and the 2023 University of Notre Dame Attitudes Toward Democracy Survey (NDATD), we demonstrate the importance of attitudes supporting “Right Wing Authoritarianism” in how Americans perceive the Capitol rioters and its architects. Variation within gender by race – separating out patterns among white, Latinx, Black, and Asian American individuals – and in complementary fashion within race by gender –looking separately at women and men—is at the heart of our race-gendered analysis, and reveals crucial insight into the varied reactions within the electorate. Doing so challenges monolithic narratives of women voters and voters of color, and highlights the advantages of an intersectional approach to analyzing contemporary politics.
Moral rhetoric presents a strategic dilemma for female politicians, who must navigate stereotypes while appealing to copartisan voters. In this article, we investigate how gender shapes elite moral rhetoric given the influence of partisanship, ideology, gender stereotypes, and moral psychology. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we examine how female and male representatives differ in their emphasis on the five foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity. Using the Moral Foundations Dictionary, we analyze a corpus of 2.23 million tweets by U.S. Congress members between 2013 and 2021. We find that female representatives are more likely to emphasize care and less likely to emphasize authority and loyalty than their male peers. However, when subsetting by party, we find that gender effects are most pronounced among Democrats and largely negligible among Republicans. These findings offer insight into the rhetorical dynamics of political leadership at the intersection of gender and partisan identities.