Follow-up on a Twitter thread about anti-man bias

PS: Political Science & Politics published Utych 2020 "Powerless Conservatives or Powerless Findings?", which responded to arguments in my 2019 "Left Unchecked" PS symposium entry. From Utych 2020:

Zigerell (2019) presented arguments that research supporting a conservative ideology is less likely to be published than research supporting a liberal ideology, focusing on the most serious accusations of ideological bias and research malfeasance. This article considers another less sinister explanation—that research about issues such as anti-man bias may not be published because it is difficult to show conclusive evidence that it exists or has an effect on the political world.

I wasn't aware of the Utych 2020 PS article until I saw a tweet that it was published, but the PS editors kindly permitted me to publish a reply, which discussed evidence that anti-man bias exists and has an effect on the political world.

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One of the pieces of evidence for anti-man bias mentioned in my PS reply was the Schwarz and Coppock meta-analysis of candidate choice experiments involving male candidates and female candidates. This meta-analysis was accepted at the Journal of Politics, and Steve Utych indicated on Twitter that it was a "great article" and that he was a reviewer of the article. The meta-analysis detected a bias favoring female candidates over male candidates, so I asked Steve Utych whether it is reasonable to characterize the results from the meta-analysis as reasonably good evidence that anti-man bias exists and has an effect in the political realm.

I thought that the exchange that I had with Steve Utych was worth saving (archived: https://archive.is/xFQvh). According to Steve Utych, this great meta-analysis of candidate choice experiments "doesn't present information about discrimination or biases". In the thread, Steve Utych wouldn't describe what he would accept as evidence of anti-man bias in the political realm, but he was willing to equate anti-man bias with alien abduction.

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Suzanne Schwarz, who is the lead author of the Schwarz and Coppock meta-analysis, issued a series of tweets (archived: https://archive.is/pFSJ0). The thread was locked before I could respond, so I thought that I would blog about my comments on her points, which she labeled "first" through "third".

Her first point, about majority preference, doesn't seem to be relevant about whether anti-man bias exists and has an effect in the political realm.

For her second point, that voting in candidate choice experiments might differ from voting in real elections, I think that it's within reason to dismiss results from survey experiments, and I think that it's within reason to interpret results from survey experiments as offering evidence about the real world. But I think that each person should hold no more than one of those positions at a given time.

So if Suzanne Schwarz doesn't think that the meta-analysis provides evidence about voter behavior in real elections, there might still be time for her and her co-author to remove language from their JOP article that suggests that results from the meta-analysis provide evidence about voter behavior in real elections, such as:

Overall, our findings offer evidence against demand-side explanations of the gender gap in politics. Rather than discriminating against women who run for office, voters on average appear to reward women.

And instead of starting the article with "Do voters discriminate against women running for office?", maybe the article could instead start by quoting language from Suzanne Schwarz's tweets. Something such as:

Do "voters support women more in experiments that simulate hypothetical elections with hypothetical candidates"? And should anyone care, given that this "does not necessarily mean that those voters would support female politicians in real elections that involve real candidates and real stakes"?

I think that Suzanne Schwarz's third point is that a person's preference for A relative to B cannot be interpreted as an "anti" bias against B, without information about that person's attitudinal bias, stereotypes, or animus regarding B.

Suzanne Schwarz claimed that we would not interpret a preference for orange packaging over green packaging as evidence of an "anti-green" bias, but let's use a hypothetical involving people, of an employer who always hires White applicants over equally qualified Black applicants. I think that it would be at least as reasonable to describe that employer as having an anti-Black bias, compared to applying the Schwarz and Coppock language quoted above, to describe that employer as "appear[ing] to reward" White applicants.

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The Schwarz and Coppock meta-analysis of 67 survey experiments seems like it took a lot of work, was published in one of the top political science journals, and, according to its abstract, was based on an experimental methodology that "[has] become a standard part of the political science toolkit for understanding the effects of candidate characteristics on vote choice", with results that add to the evidence that "voter preferences are not a major factor explaining the persistently low rates of women in elected office".

So it's interesting to see the "doesn't present information about discrimination or biases" and "does not necessarily mean that those voters would support female politicians in real elections that involve real candidates and real stakes" reactions on Twitter archived above, respectively from a peer reviewer who described the work as "great" and from one of the co-authors.

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NOTES

1. Zach Goldberg and I have a manuscript presenting evidence that anti-man bias exists and has a political effect, based on participant feeling thermometer ratings about men and about women in data from the 2019 wave of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group VOTER survey. Zach tweeted about a prior version of the manuscript. The idea for the manuscript goes back at least to a Twitter exchange from March 2020 (Zach, me).

Steve Utych reported on the 2019 wave of this VOTER survey in his 2021 Electoral Studies article about sexism against women, but neither his 2021 Electoral Studies article or his PS article questioning the idea of anti-man bias reported results from the feeling thermometer ratings about men and about women.