Comments on Deckman and Cassese 2021 "Gendered nationalism and the 2016 US presidential election"
Politics & Gender published Deckman and Cassese 2021 "Gendered nationalism and the 2016 US presidential election", which, in 2022, shared an award for the best article published in Politics & Gender the prior year.
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1.
So what is gendered nationalism? From Deckman and Cassese 2021 (p. 281):
Rather than focus on voters' sense of their own masculinity and femininity, we consider whether voters characterized American society as masculine or feminine and whether this macro-level gendering, or gendered nationalism as we call it, had political implications in the 2016 presidential election.
So how is this characterization of American society as masculine or feminine measured? The Deckman and Cassese 2021 online appendix indicates that gendered nationalism is...
Measured with a single survey item asking whether "Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine." Responses were provided on a four-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
So the measure of "whether voters characterized American society as masculine or feminine" (p. 281) ranged from the characterization that American society is (too) feminine to the characterization that American society is...not (too) feminine. The "(too)" is because I suspect that respondents might interpret the "too" in "too soft and feminine" as also applying to "feminine", but I'm not sure it matters much.
Regardless, there are at least three potential relevant characterizations: American society is feminine, masculine, or neither feminine nor masculine. It seems like a poor research design to combine two of these characterizations.
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2.
Deckman and Cassese 2021 also described gendered nationalism as (p. 278):
Our project diverges from this work by focusing on beliefs about the gendered nature of American society as a whole—a sense of whether society is 'appropriately' masculine or has grown too soft and feminine.
But disagreement with the characterization that "Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine" doesn't necessarily indicate a characterization that society is "appropriately" masculine, because a respondent could believe that society is too masculine or that society is neither feminine nor masculine.
Omission of a response option indicating a belief that American society is (too) masculine might have made it easier for Deckman and Cassese 2021 to claim that "we suppose that those who rejected gendered nationalism were likely more inclined to vote for Hillary Clinton" (p. 282), as if only the measured "too soft and feminine" characterization is acceptance of "gendered nationalism" and not the unmeasured characterization that American society is (too) masculine.
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3.
Regression results in Table 2 of Deckman and Cassese 2021 indicate that gendered nationalism predicts a vote for Trump over Clinton in 2016, net of controls for political party, a single measure of political ideology, and demographics such as class, race, and education.
Gendered nationalism is the only specific belief in the regression, and Deckman and Cassese 2021 reports no evidence about whether "beliefs about the gendered nature of American society as a whole" has any explanatory power above other beliefs about gender, such as gender roles and animus toward particular genders.
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4.
Deckman and Cassese 2021 reported on four categories of class: lower class, working class, middle class, and upper class. Deckman and Cassese 2021 hypothesis H2 is that:
Gendered nationalism is more common among working-class men and women than among men and women with other socioeconomic class identifications.
For such situations, in which the hypothesis is that one of four categories is distinctive, the most straightforward approach is to omit from the regressions the hypothesized distinctive category, because then the p-values and coefficients for each of the three included categories will provide information about the evidence that that included category differs from the omitted category.
But the regressions in Deckman and Cassese 2021 omitted middle class, and, based on the middle model in Table 1, Deckman and Cassese 2021 concluded that:
Working-class Democrats were significantly more likely to agree that the United States has grown too soft and feminine, consistent with H2.
But the coefficients and standard errors were 0.57 and 0.26 for working class and 0.31 and 0.40 for lower class, so I'm not sure that the analysis in Table 1 contained enough evidence that the 0.57 estimate for working class differs from the 0.31 estimate for lower class.
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5.
I think that Deckman and Cassese 2021 might have also misdescribed the class results in the Conclusions section, in the passage below, which doesn't seem limited to Democrat participants. From p. 295:
In particular, the finding that working-class voters held distinctive views on gendered nationalism is compelling given that many accounts of voting behavior in 2016 emphasized support for Donald Trump among the (white) working class.
For that "distinctive" claim, Deckman and Cassese 2021 seemed to reference differences in statistical significance (p. 289, footnote omitted):
The upper- and lower-class respondents did not differ from middle-class respondents in their endorsement of gendered nationalism beliefs. However, people who identified as working class were significantly more likely to agree that the United States has grown too soft and feminine, though the effect was marginally significant (p = .09) in a two-tailed test. This finding supports the idea that working-class voters hold a distinctive set of beliefs about gender and responded to the gender dynamics in the campaign with heightened support for Donald Trump’s candidacy, consistent with H2.
In the Table 1 baseline model predicting gendered nationalism without interactions, ologit coefficients are 0.25 for working class and 0.26 for lower class, so I'm not sure that there is sufficient evidence that working class views on gendered nationalism were distinctive from lower class views on gendered nationalism, even though the evidence is stronger that the 0.25 working class coefficient differs from zero than the 0.26 lower class coefficient differs from zero.
Looks like the survey's pre-election wave had at least twice as many working class respondents as lower class respondents. If that ratio was similar for the post-election wave, that would explain the difference in statistical significance and explain why the standard error was smaller for the working class (0.15) than for the lower class (0.23). Search for "class" at the PRRI site and use the PRRI/The Atlantic 2016 White Working Class Survey.
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6.
At least Deckman and Cassese 2021 interpreted the positive coefficient on the interaction of college and Republican as an estimate of how the association of college and the outcome among Republicans differed from the association of college and the outcome among the omitted category.
But I'm not sure of the justification for "largely" in Deckman and Cassese 2021 (p. 293):
Thus, in accordance with our mediation hypothesis (H5), gender differences in beliefs that the United States has grown too soft and feminine largely account for the gender gap in support for Donald Trump in 2016.
Inclusion of the predictor for gendered nationalism pretty much only halves the logit coefficient for "female", from 0.80 to 0.42, and, in Figure 3, the gender gap in predicted probability of a Trump vote is pretty much only cut in half, too. I wouldn't call about half "largely", especially without addressing the obvious confound of attitudes about men and women that have nothing to do with "gendered nationalism".
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7.
Deckman and Cassese 2021 was selected for a best article award by the editorial board of Politics & Gender. From my prior posts on publications in Politics & Gender: p < .000, misinterpreted interaction terms, and an example of the difference in statistical signifiance being used to infer an difference in effect.
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NOTES
1. Prior post mentioning Deckman and Cassese 2021.
2. Prior post on deviations from a preregistration plan, for Cassese and Barnes 2017.
3. "Gendered nationalism" is an example of use of a general term when a better approach would be specificity, such as a measure that separates "masculine nationalism" from "feminine nationalism". Another example is racial resentment, in which a general term is used to describe only the type of racial resentment directed at Blacks. Feel free to read through participant comments in the Kam and Burge survey, in which plenty of comments from respondents who score low on the racial resentment scale indicate resentment directed at Whites.
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