The “Elephant in the Room”: White Women, Gender Identity, and Collective Political Choice in the U.S. Presidential Election of 2016

Abstract

In the United States presidential election of 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trump made headlines for his disparaging comments about women, while his opponent, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, made history as the first female candidate to represent a major political party in a presidential election. Accordingly, many observers were surprised to discover that 53% of White women ultimately turned out to vote for Trump on Election Day. Such voting starkly contrasted with that of Black and Latina women, 94% and 69% of whom respectively submitted votes for Clinton.

Inspired by these circumstances, this thesis investigates the nature of White women’s political choices, exploring their voting within the gender gap, whereby women as a whole tend to be more politically liberal than are men, presumably because of gendered preferences. As seen in 2016 and previous elections, underlying this gap are deep voting divisions among women of different races, as well as implicitly differing attitudes with respect to the political significance of gender and women’s issues. Theorizing that these political divergences owe to greater interdependence and therefore more collective than personal political engagement among White women, this thesis examines the political psychology of these women’s political choices, testing related hypotheses through an online sample survey. Results, though failing to locate a moderating effect of interdependent self-construal on collective political choices, do suggest strong associations between micro collective political judgments and both men’s and women’s political choices in the 2016 election. Irrespective of gender, Americans thus appear to have voted in the election with their own and their families’ shared interests in mind, a concept that can help to explain why many White women might have voted for Trump despite possible personal discomfort with the gendered implications of his candidacy.

This thesis concludes with the assessment of scholarly implications of this research and with the presentation of separate public policy implications for relevant political actors, including political candidates, political parties, and interest groups. Finally, this thesis considers specific policy implications with respect to the problem of female underrepresentation in United States political institutions.