Political science blog coverage of an on-point experiment regarding gender double standards for politicians involved in a sex scandal

On October 27, 2019, U.S. Representative Katie Hill announced her resignation from Congress after her involvement in a sex scandal, claiming that she was leaving "because of a double standard".

There is a recently published article that reports on an experiment that can be used to assess such a double standard among the public, at least with an MTurk sample of over 1,000, with women about 45% of the sample: Barnes et al. 2018 "Sex and corruption: How sexism shapes voters' responses to scandal" in Politics, Groups, and Identities (ungated). Participants in the Barnes et al. 2018 experiment indicated on a four-point scale how likely they would be to vote for a representative in the next election; the experiment manipulated the hypothetical U.S. Representative's sex (man or woman) and the type of scandal that the representative had been involved in (corruption or sex).

Results in Barnes et al. 2018 Figure 1 indicated that, compared to the reported vote likelihoods for the male representative among participants assigned to the male representative involved in the sex scandal, participants assigned to the female representative involved in the sex scandal were not less likely to vote for the female representative.

---

The Monkey Cage published a post by Michael Tesler, entitled "Was Rep. Katie Hill held to a higher standard than men in Congress? This research suggests she was". The post did not mention the Barnes et al. 2018 experiment.

---

Mischiefs of Faction published a post by Gregory Koger and Jeffrey Lazarus that did mention the Barnes et al. 2018 experiment, but the Koger/Lazarus post did not mention the null finding across the full sample. The post instead mentioned the finding of a correlate of relative disfavoring of the female candidate (links omitted in the quoted passage below):

One answer is that there is sexist double standard for female politicians. One recently published article (ungated) by Tiffany Barnes, Emily Beaulieu, and Gregory Saxton finds that citizens are more likely to disapprove of a sex scandal by a female politician if they a) generally disapprove of women "usurping men's power," or b) see themselves as protectors of women, with protection contingent upon conformity to traditional gender roles. Both dynamics help explain why alleged House-rule-breaker Hill is resigning, while alleged federal-lawbreaker Hunter was reelected in 2018 and shows no interest in resigning.

The Koger/Lazarus post doesn't explain why these correlates are more important than the result among all participants or, for that matter, more important than the dynamic in Barnes et al. 2018 Figure 2 among participants with low hostile sexism scores.

The Koger/Lazarus post suggests that the Barnes et al. 2018 experiment detected a correlation between relative disfavoring of the female politician involved in a sex scandal and participant responses to a benevolent sexism scale (the "b" part of the passage quoted above). I don't think that is a correct description of the results: see Barnes et al. 2018 Table 1, Barnes et al. 2018 Figure 2, and/or the Barnes et al. 2018 statement that "Participants are thus unlikely to differentiate between the sex of the representative when responding to allegations about the representative's involvement in a sex scandal, regardless of the participant's level of benevolent sexism" (p. 13).

For what it's worth, the Barnes et al. 2018 abstract can be read as suggesting that the experiment did detect a bias among persons with high scores on a benevolent sexism scale.

---

Barnes et al. 2018 is a recently published large-sample experiment that found that, in terms of vote likelihood, participants assigned to a hypothetical female U.S. Representative involved in a sex scandal treated that female representative remarkably similar to the way in which participants assigned to the hypothetical male representative involved in a sex scandal treated that male representative. This result is not mentioned in two political science blog posts discussing the claim of a gender double standard made by a female U.S. Representative involved in a sex scandal.