Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on September 21, 2007
Public Opinion Quarterly 2008 72(1):76-89; doi:10.1093/poq/nfm035
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Social Desirability Effects and Support for a Female American President
Address correspondence to Matthew J. Streb; e-mail: mstreb{at}niu.edu
Public opinion polls show consistently that a substantial portion of the American public would vote for a qualified female presidential candidate. Because of the controversial nature of such questions, however, the responses may suffer from social desirability effects. In other words, respondents may be purposely giving false answers as not to violate societal norms. Using an unobtrusive measure called the "list experiment," we find that public opinion polls are indeed exaggerating support for a female president. Roughly 26 percent of the public is "angry or upset" about the prospect of a female president. Moreover, this level of dissatisfaction is constant across several demographic groups.
Received for publication June 5, 2006. Revision received September 11, 2006. Accepted for publication October 25, 2006.
MATTHEW J. STREB AND BARBARA BURRELL are at Northern Illinois University, Department of Political Science, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA. BRIAN FREDERICK is at Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, MA 02325, USA. MICHAEL A. GENOVESE is with the Loyola Marymount University, Department of Political Science, University Hall, 4200 Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA.
Disclaimer statement: Partial funding was provided by the Institute for Leadership Studies at Loyola Marymount University. The authors would like to thank Christine Barbour, Jim Carlson, Kathleen Dolan, Brian Schaffner, Paul Sniderman, Gerald Wright, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. All errors, of course, are the sole responsibility of the authors.