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Democracy’s Disparity? Gender, Equality, and the 2020 Iowa Caucuses

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Abstract

The Iowa caucuses are often praised for exemplifying the ideal of deliberative democracy. From this perspective, voters come together publicly on equal footing to debate and choose their preferred presidential candidate. Critics contend, however, that the caucus process is not as democratic as supporters believe. In practice, they claim, caucuses mirror power asymmetries rooted in society-based differences based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. To assess these competing claims, we test whether there is a relationship between group identity and the degree of comfort Iowa voters feel expressing an opinion during the deliberative process. Using interviews, observations, and results from a survey taken by 1024 Iowan voters, we find data consistent with both perspectives. Men and women are generally comfortable voicing beliefs at the caucus, but men more so. Additionally, women are more likely than men to feel social pressure to vote a certain way, discuss their candidate choice with others, and express a sense of community through the process. We conclude that female participants are more open and sociable than men while attending a caucus, but less assertive in sharing their opinions. Based on this criterion, we determine that the Iowa caucuses, while generally approximating the ideal of deliberative democracy, are nonetheless less democratic than its proponents contend.

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Notes

  1. Interview with “Bev” at the Lamoni Welcome Center on I-35 North. February 2, 2020.

  2. Consistent with prior research, we also find disparities regarding who attends caucuses, but for the most part we do not address that in this paper.

  3. In this paper, we define marginalized groups as: non-white people, non-male-identifying people, non-heterosexual-identifying people, low-income people, disabled people, and ethnically Hispanic or Latino people. However, due to data limits, we focus primarily on differences due to gender, sexual orientation and race.

  4. This is not to say that voting in a primary is perfectly accessible either. Participation is affected by obstacles such as voter ID requirements, lack of language access, voter roll purges, reduced poll hours and long wait times.

  5. Because deliberation privileges some interests at the expense of others, it can be seen as another tactic to allocate one’s power.

  6. See Appendix 1 for a discussion of the survey methodology.

  7. The survey we designed assumes there is no difference between the group of people who provided an email address in their voter registration and the group of people who did not.

  8. A full demographic breakdown is provided in Appendix 2.

  9. We weighted the survey using Stata 16’s ipfweight command to match exit poll data regarding turnout by race, education and gender. We were not able to match our sample with the exit poll data regarding income or age, but the raw numbers indicate that our respondents skewed slightly older, and with higher incomes, than caucus goers as a whole.

  10. Age, gender, income bracket, 7-point political ideology scale (1 being extremely liberal, 7 being extremely conservative), education, sexual orientation, disability, race, geography and which candidate they initially supported.

  11. Just under 36% of caucus goers responded to the invitation to comment, including 38% of women, and 33% of men.

  12. Respondents could select more than one answer.

  13. This catalogue compiles registered voters’ first name, middle name, last name, birthdate, county of residence, Iowa congressional house district, Iowa congressional senate district, zip code, political party, phone number, voter status, and sometimes an email address.

  14. Districts 3, 4, 12, 17, 22, 24, 27, 34,40, 41, 45, 46, 52, 56, 58, 60, 63, 66, 72, 73, 88, 89, 90, 99. We chose this number of districts based on the financial constraints of our budget.

  15. According to the 2010 Census, each district has a total population of approximately 30,464 people.

  16. See Appendix 3.

  17. It is optional for Iowa voters to list their email address when they register to vote. Therefore, our sample was limited to people who (a) had email addresses, and (b) shared the information when they registered.

  18. See Appendix 4.

  19. With incumbent President Trump already securely slated to be the Republican candidate, Republican voters may have found it less necessary to show up to caucus, and thus less likely to respond to an email asking for their opinion on the 2020 caucuses.

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Correspondence to Matthew J. Dickinson.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

First, we contacted the Iowa Secretary of State’s office to request a voter registration list.Footnote 13 We requested the files for voters living in 24 state congressional house districts.Footnote 14 Each district has a population of approximately 21,000 to 22,000 registered voters.Footnote 15 To generate a random sample of Iowan voters, we used a random number generator. We ran the generator 23 times. For our 24th choice, we selected District 41, where we observed the caucus. Next, we used a political mapFootnote 16 to ensure we had geographic representation from different regions of the state and variation in terms of voters from rural, suburban, and urban environments. The office of the Iowa Secretary of State emailed us a .csv Excel file with information from 519,677 voters. The master file included 19,640 email addresses.Footnote 17 We created a new Excel sheet, where we transferred the information of all of the people whose email addresses we obtained.

Next, we designed a survey to supplement our qualitative research.Footnote 18 We sent the link along with a message to the 19,620 email addresses. A few weeks later, we resent the link along with a reminder email. We exported the respondents’ individual level data to a .csv file that we imported into STATA, a statistical regression software package.

Appendix 2

When we tabulated the responses, we found our survey was overwhelmingly white (95.6%); only 1.1% of the respondents identified as black, 1% as Asian, and .42% as American Indian or Alaska Native. Less than 2% identified as Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino. Furthermore, 78.9% of the participants possessed a bachelor’s degree or higher. 69.1% of them had a household income of more than $50,000 per year – 34.1% of the contributors earned more than $100,000 per year. About one in ten (10.8%) identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning. Two people identified as transgender, seven identified as gender non-conforming or non-binary. 50.7% identified as cis-gender male, 48.4% identified as cis-gender women. 7.9% of the participants identified themselves as disabled. 42.3% of contributors live in urban settings. 33.4% live in suburbia, and 22.4% live in a rural environment. 68.5% of respondents are currently registered Democrats.Footnote 19 58.7% of the people caucused in Iowa’s 2020 presidential nomination cycle.

For reference, Iowa’s 2010 Census electoral profile shows 90.2% of the voting population is white. 4% is black. 6.2 % identify as Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino. 27.7% possess a bachelor’s degree or higher. The median household income is $53,712; 30.5% of the registered voters in the state are affiliated with the Democratic Party. Approximately 16% of eligible Iowan voters caucused.

Appendix 3: Map of State House Representative Districts

figure a

Appendix 4: Survey

The survey is uploaded to this Google Drive link.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fD9wZbgA8A7oi01XxK_JidUz448Z8ss1/view?usp=sharing

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Joseph, M.F., Dickinson, M.J. Democracy’s Disparity? Gender, Equality, and the 2020 Iowa Caucuses. Soc 57, 686–692 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00552-w

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