Hegemonic Masculinity and Political Ideology in the U.S.

The dominance of political power by men is well-established over decades of research, but increasingly scholars move beyond a categorical, binary approach to understanding this relationship. Instead, by focusing on masculinity as constructed within and through a patriarchal gender system that shapes all aspects of society at the individual, interactional, and structural levels, masculinity as a concept opens up new areas of empirical inquiry for political scholars. For example, work suggests that there is a strong relationship between how an individual views themself as a gendered person and their political beliefs and behaviors. The stronger a person’s polarized gender self-conceptualization – men as mainly masculine and women as mainly feminine - the more likely they are to be politically conservative. Self-assessed masculine traits also may drive greater conservatism and higher engagement in political activism, for those who identify as men and as women. Yet, measures that rely only on self-assessed gendered characteristics miss the prescriptive role of gender in shaping the valence we assign to others and not only ourselves. It is this contextual interaction between the individual and the social that makes gender a particularly reified social institution. We ask how social norms of hegemonic masculinity are linked to political affiliations and ideologies. We explain the relevance of hegemonic masculine social norms as another dimension of gendered political engagement. Using data from a unique online dataset of American adults, balanced equally by respondents who self-identify as conservative or liberal and as men or women, we examine descriptive and inferential patterns in masculinity and political affiliation and ideology. Our findings show a strong relationship between hegemonic masculinity and political conservatism. Democrats and political liberals both indicate less agreement with the most traditional tenets of normative masculinity, but also reject the larger system of masculine expectations. Gender, education, and racial cleavages matter above and beyond political affiliations however, and suggest opportunities for conservative operatives to make in-roads toward non-white voters, especially men.