The Gendered Double Bind: A Quantitative Analysis of the Disproportionate Obstacles Faced by Female Politicians
Since the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, I have become interested in studying the unique obstacles faced by female politicians due to their gender. While Hillary Clinton was by no means a perfect candidate, the coverage and evaluation of her electoral race was mired in sexism. I want to use pre and post debate survey data to analyze how Americans perceived Hillary Clinton’s competence and character.
Dataset Information Title: Emotional Reactions to the 2016 General Election Debates via openicpsr.org Attribution: Fridkin, Kim, and Gershon, Sarah Allen. Emotional Reactions to the 2016 General Election Debates. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-05-18. License: Distributed through a public access repository under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. Compliance requirements include: citing data in any publications, agreeing not to intentionally identify any survey participants, and assuming responsibility for the implications of data usage. Documentation: No codebook is included, but the study includes PDF documents of the pre and post-debate surveys.
Summary: This study employed a survey method to examine American students’ emotional reactions to the first and third presidential debates leading up to the 2016 election. The study used pre and post-test questionnaires as well as facial recognition software that tracked viewers’ expressions in real time during and after the debate. Survey metrics include: subject demographic characteristics, political attitudes, feelings towards the candidates, and tracking of emotional reactions.
(To read more about my process and view my visualizations, please see files PSCI107_Project1_Callahan.pdf)