Sexual Harassment and Candidate Evaluation: Gender and Partisanship Interact to Affect Voter Responses to Candidates Accused of Harassment

Abstract

Public airing of incidents of sexual harassment have moved abuse from the shadows to the light, spurring mass response in the form of #MeToo and “Time’s Up.” While sexual harassment holds negative valence, election outcomes suggest that not all voters punish leaders accused of harassment. We argue there is systematic variation in how voters respond to candidates accused of harassment because evaluations are made within the context of both partisanship and the gendered issue of sexual harassment. As a result, we expect to find distinct responses across four voter groups—Democratic women and men, and Republican women and men on the specific issue of harassment. We present supporting evidence from two survey experiments and a third associational study to show that Democratic women are most likely to electorally punish sexual harassers. Experimental evidence also shows that Republican men are least likely to electorally punish candidates accused of harassment.