Introduction to the Special Issue on Gender and Political Psychology

A decade ago, when I was working on my gender and political psychology-focused dissertation, the interdisciplinary approach didn’t do much to make me feel like a psychologist while simultaneously leaving me feeling disconnected from political science. At the time, gender and political psychology was just starting to coalesce as its own robust (sub) subfield. Within just a few years, political science research that centered the psychological experience of gender or used methods and/or theories borrowed from social psychology bourgeoned. An increasing number of gender scholars began identifying their work as being consistent with political psychology and more scholars began couching their work in the field. As a result, what we now understand about the role of gender in politics has expanded significantly thanks to a scholarly field rich in diversity of focus, methods, and contribution. This special issue is but one example of the breadth of that contribution in American politics. This issue includes eight substantive and methodological examples of how gendered psychology frames political attitudes, phenomena, and identities. These contributions spotlight how crucial gender can be in political campaigns – including candidate emergence, evaluation, and fundraising. They offer insight into how women leaders may present themselves to the public and how the public responds. We also learn from these authors more about how gender contributes to public opinion. These authors often demonstrate how women are not monolithic; rather, we see how race and political party interact with gender in distinct ways – a crucial evolution for social science in general. Race, in particular, has been shown to create cohesive political bonds by way of the concept of “linked fate” (Dawson 1994), which describes how the ubiquitous subjection of Blacks to racial discrimination forms a bond that is unique to Black identity and consciousness. However, scholars have also demonstrated that, although men and women may share a race, their identity manifests differently across gender (Capers and Watts Smith 2016; Gershon et al. 2019; Simien 2005). In this issue, Tony Carey and Mary-Kate Lizotte – in “The Ties that Bind: Public Opinion and Linked Fate among Women of Color” – extend this psychological concept to explore whether there is potential for minority women to form coalitions around political issues where they share similar attitudes. Their findings point to the importance of economic marginalization in creating fertile ground for interracial coalitions of women of color and offer further support for calls to add intersectional complexity to the study of public opinion. Rachel Smilan-Goldstein similarly draws on a psychological concept – fear of rape (FOR) – to offer deeper insight into how the political attitudes of women may be shaped by sexual violence in her contribution, “What About the Rapists? The Political Psychology of Women’s Policing Attitudes.” This concept captures an individual’s concern about a type of assault that is actually somewhat rare but often presented in misleading or false ways in the media and pop culture: stranger rape. Specifically, Smilan-Goldstein looks at how this uniquely gendered threat interacts with other identities (i.e., race, party) to mold attitudes toward police and policing. As she finds, FOR itself has partisan, racial, and generational differences (e.g., white women and Republicans are more fearful) that result in within gender differences on deference to police officers and attitudes about policing.