LAUSR

When individuals express opinions about American politics, they are often motivated to defend their own party – but conscious consideration can reduce these partisan biases. In this study, we identify the degree to which Americans evaluate sexual misconduct in politics a biased manner. We further examine whether reported support for the #MeToo movement reduces these biases. We conduct a two-wave survey on a large nationally representative panel of Americans, including one embedded survey experiment. We find that, as decades of work on partisan motivated reasoning would suggest, partisans are strongly more likely to presume that an out-party member, rather than an in-party member, is guilty of sexual misconduct. This holds across Democrats and Republicans and across men and women. We further find that individuals who express the strongest preferences for their own party over the other – i.e. those with the strongest partisan biases – are also more likely to evaluate sexual misconduct allegations in a biased manner. We then turn to the moderating role of the #MeToo movement. Our data show that, controlling for relevant confounds, Americans’ support for the #MeToo movement is associated with reductions in biases when evaluating sexual misconduct allegations, particularly among those who show the strongest in-party preferences.