Attitudes About Disability and Political Participation Since the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the relations among social identity, intergroup attitudes, and political participation. I focus specifically on differences between disabled and non-disabled people and their attitudes toward disability and participation in disability rights activism. I ground my work in social identity theory and utilize the stereotype content model, social identity model of collective action, and other research on this topic. I recruited participants from a variety of sources including an introductory level psychology course, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and a national disability rights organization. In Study 1, I found that disabled identity, considering disability to be an important election issue, and closeness to disabled people were all predictors of participating in disability rights activism after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Moreover, all but the latter remain significant even when controlling for previous activism participation. In Study 2, I examined non-disabled peoples’ attitudes toward disability. My results suggested that hostile ableism, but not benevolent ableism, negatively relates to other negative attitudes about disability. In addition, hostile ableism correlated positively with both hostile and benevolent sexism, but benevolent ableism only correlated with benevolent sexism. Finally, in Study 3, I found that non-disabled and disabled people express hostile and benevolent ableism differently. For disabled people, hostile and benevolent ableism work in much the same way. Both are part of an interconnected system of prejudice, as both relate to negative attitudes about other social groups. For non-disabled people, on the other hand, only hostile ableism worked this way. Benevolent ableism, rather, appeared to be a unique form of prejudice. Non-disabled benevolent ableists actually had positive attitudes toward disabled people. However, they endorsed the medical model of disability and reported greater non-disabled identity, agreeing to items suggesting they want to remain a part of the non-disabled community. As such, although they did not have negative attitudes about disabled people, they did have negative attitudes about disability. Taken together, these results suggest that activists and educators interested in reducing prejudice against disabled people would benefit from addressing both hostile and benevolent forms of ableism.