The MeToo Movement and Civic Engagement among Young voters

• In Event: #MeToo and Responses to Sexual Harassment

Abstract

During 2018, the MeToo movement helped reveal immoral and predatory behavior by Hollywood celebrities, famous business people, prominent academics, and at least two politicians: John Conyers and Al Franken. This movement gained additional importance in October 2018 during Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. As a social movement, the MeToo movement can potentially galvanize civic activity (Baumgartner and Mahoney 2005; Rucht 1999), change the policy agendas that governments pursue (Banaszak 1996; Symanski 2003), and even produce a backlash (Piven and Cloward 1977; Fording 2001). In this paper, we investigate whether the MeToo movement spurred additional civic activity among younger voters in the United States during the 2018 election cycle. #MeToo was used on Twitter more than 19 million times in a one year period (Anderson and Toor 2018) and use of this and other social media sites remains heavily skewed towards young adults (Smith and Anderson 2018). Did posting about MeToo help galvanize young adults to participate in other ways? We use a survey of approximately 1,000 American voters between the ages of 18 and 25 via mTurk on November 7, 2018. Through a series of matching analyses, we find that posting about the MeToo movement on social media yielded higher levels of civic activity away from the internet. This finding holds after controlling for an array of competing explanations, including underlying support for the MeToo movements, the extent to which one posted about other political issues, and levels of online civic activity.

References

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Authors

• Ken Moffett, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

• Laurie L. Rice, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville