Kahan and his collaborators went on: “Increasing hierarchical and individualistic worldviews induce greater risk-skepticism in white males than in either white women or male or female nonwhites.”
In other words, people who rank high in egalitarian or communitarian values, including liberal-white men, are highly risk averse. Among those at the opposite end of the scale — low in communitarianism and egalitarianism but high in individualism and in support for hierarchy — conservative white men — are markedly more willing to tolerate risk than other constituencies.
The authors write:
Individualistic and hierarchical people should be more concerned about being rendered defenseless by guns that are associated with hierarchical social roles (hunter/protector, father) as well as with hierarchical or individualistic virtues (courage/honour, chivalry and self-reliance, prowess). Gun violence should concern communitarians and those who are relatively egalitarian or communitarian because guns are often associated with racism, patriarchy, and distrust of strangers.
A paper published in 2000, “Gender, race, and perceived risk: the `white male effect’,” by Melissa Finucane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, Slovic, Mertz, James Flynn of Decision Research and Theresa A. Satterfield of the University of British Columbia, tested responses to 25 hazards and found that “white males’ risk perception ratings were consistently much lower” than those of white women, minority women and minority men.
The white male effect, they continued “seemed to be caused by about 30 percent of the white male sample” who were “better educated, had higher household incomes, and were politically more conservative. They also held very different attitudes, characterized by trust in institutions and authorities and by anti-egalitarianism” — in other word they tended to be Republicans.
Although opinions on egalitarianism or communitarianism may explain why a few white men are Democrats; the motivations of white women who vote for Republicans is less clear. Cassese and Tiffany D. Barnes, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, address this question in their 2018 paper “Reconciling Sexism and Women’s Support for Republican Candidates: A Look at Gender, Class, and Whiteness in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Races.”
Cassese, Barnes and others found that education and social class played a greater role in the voting decisions made by women in 2016 than they did for men.
Trump voters were more likely to have a lower income than men. This difference was 13 points in full sample, and 14 points for white respondents. The proportion of male, high-income Trump supporters is higher than that of female, high-income Trump supporters, by 9 percentage points in both the full sample and for white voters only. These findings challenge a dominant narrative surrounding the election — rather than attracting downwardly-mobile white men, Trump’s campaign disproportionately attracted and mobilized economically marginal white women.
Cassese and Barnes pose the question: “Why were a majority of white women willing to tolerate Trump’s sexism?” To answer, the authors examined polling responses to three questions, “Do women demanding equality seek special favors?” “Do women complaining about discrimination cause more problems than they solve?” and “How much discrimination do women face in the United States?” Cassese and Barnes describe the first two questions as measures of “hostile sexism,” which they defined this way: “Hostile sexism refers to negative views toward individuals who violate traditional gender roles.”
They found that “hostile sexism” and “denial of discrimination against women are strong predictors of white women’s vote choice in 2016,” but these factors were “not predictive of voting for Romney in 2012.” Put another way, “white women who display hostile sexist attitudes and who perceive low levels of gender discrimination in society are more likely to support Trump.”
Source: NY Times