Gender Flashcards
Attar Taylor and Scott
There is generally declining patriarchy, with far fewer people agreeing that a man’s job is to earn money and the woman stays home
Is gender a cleavage?
A cleavage denotes a specific identity on which you vote, so are there enough gender-specific issues? Are there interest groups which push for specific issues (feminist groups)? Gender is a less salient cleavage than other groups, such as religion or race. Gender is mostly a non-politicised cleavage. Are there male-specific issues? Parties can capitalise on masculinity, such as the loss of status, or the state of precarious employment
In comparison to other social cleavages, gender is striking because 1) the majority group does the worst; 2) there are substantial inequalities in wealth and power, but 3) it is only mildly politicised
Dalton
- Education and party attachments are the most important predictors of voter turnout in the US, and gender is a much less salient factor.
- Men no longer vote more than women in post-industrial societies
- Controlling for education, partisanship and ideology, men are more likely than women to participate in campaigns, or directly contact politicians, but only in very few countries
Campbell and Shorrocks
- Instead of shifting from traditional gender gaps, to realignment, into modern gender gaps (where women would vote for left-wing parties more); Britain was stuck in realignment, where women would be more likely to vote for both Conservative and Labour than men.
- However, in 2017 a modern gender gap emerged with more women than men voting Labour and men voting Conservative. In 2019’s General Election, we continue to observe this modern gender gap, rooted in post-Brexit cleavages.
- In the European Parliament Election, women were more likely to support the Greens, whereas men were more likely to support the Brexit party. Younger men were more likely to vote Libdem, but older women were slightly more likely to vote Conservative.
- The modern gender gap in Britain is contingent rather than a result of a long-term realignment, because they depend almost entirely on Brexit-related opinions.
Shapiro and Mahajan
Men have always been significantly more conservative than women on the size of the welfare state and issues related to the use of force, such as national defense and criminal justice policy
Gillion et al
Unlikely that ‘social’ issues have created this modern gender gap between Democrats and Republicans. Argues instead it is due to mass-level ideological party sorting. The public perceived polarisation and sorted themselves into the party that best fit their preferences (basically evaluating these parties then choosing to change parties). Thus ideological sorting led relatively more men than women to move from the Democrats to the Republicans, and relatively more women than men to move from the Republicans to the Democrats.
Norris
Explanations for the gender gap based on supply and demand side.
Supply includes 1) resources, including education, time, income and civic skills; 2) cultural, including efficacy, interest, ambition, gender roles.
Demand includes 1) agency, including mobilising organisations such as churches and unions/ media and social networks, 2) institutional, which means rules and procedures make it easier for men to participate.
The supply-side explanations are the most dominant, and there is limited evidence for demand-side
Wayne
Argues for importance of institutions and political opportunity structure. Women’s protest activity contributed to the process of democratisation in repressive regimes in Latin America; and women were encouraged to participate in communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, but female political activity declined with democratisation and the return of traditional values
Burns et al
male control of resources within households is associated with greater male political participation without affecting female participation rates
Shorrocks
Religiosity is the most important!
1. In Britain, men are more left-wing than women in older birth cohorts, while women are more left-wing than men in younger cohorts
2. In older cohorts, women are more right-wing because of religiosity and the salience of religiosity for left-right placement. In younger, more secular cohorts, women are more left-wing because they support economic equality and state intervention more than men. Once religiosity and its political salience are accounted for, the difference between older men and women becomes insignificant and the change in the size of the gender gap across cohorts is much reduced.
3. Women of all cohorts are more supportive of equality, redistribution, and state intervention than men. However, for older cohorts, this support does not translate into women’s being more likely than men to identify as left-wing or vote for a left-wing party, probably because of the power of religiosity for older cohorts.
4. Consistent with Emmenegger and Manow’s argument that declining religiosity has encouraged political parties to compete along more economic lines, and in particular parties of the left to foreground their economically left-wing policies in an attempt to attract female voters who have become less attached to Christian Democratic parties because of declining religiosity, hence for younger cohorts, the salience of economic attitudes for political position increases.
Emmenegger and Manow
- The ‘modern’ gender gap - women are now more supportive of the left than men are, reversing the ‘traditional’ classic gender gap which persisted until the 1980s and 1990s, where men tended to be more supportive of the left than women
- Conventional view: changed employment patterns, women’s higher educational achievements, higher divorce rates, more single mothers. But this begs the question - why did women’s and men’s voting behaviour in the 1950s and 60s differ? It should have been harmonious between the sexes as the theory predicts preferences should have been formed at the household level
- Instead, the explanation should be: high correlation between religiosity and voting patterns, and declining religiosity has contributed to increased left-wing voting by women. Women, as religious core voters, for a long time could not credibly threaten to become socioeconomic swing voters, i.e. to switch to a left party. Religious parties could afford to ignore women’s socioeconomic interests. Declining religiosity (esp women) means political parties have begun to compete for the female vote by catering to their socioeconomic interests, even in countries that are characterized by a prominent religious cleavage. Hence (delayed) rise to the new gender vote gap.
- If inter-party competition not based on religion, then the adjustment to changed employment/family patterns happened much earlier.
- Hence strategic configuration among parties and the salience of the religious cleavage! Different from previous accounts highlighting the role of religion for the female vote
Dassoneville and Kostelka
In European Parliament elections (second order elections where there is less at stake), there is a gender gap (men>women) in voter turnout, and it is stable over time.
1. Due to gender differences in political interest. In low-turnout elections, psychological engagement with politics has even more weight. When you account for women’s overall lower level of interest in politics (by adding a self-reported level of interest variable), women turn out more than men in EP elections.
2. Women are found to be less interested in politics than men even after individual-level controls for political interest (education, employment, age, etc).
3. A higher percentage of women in the legislature during respondents’ formative years is associated with a smaller gender gap in political interest.
4. However, culture matters more, because when differences in maths scores are included, this descriptive representation effect is no longer significant. Instead, when girls do better than boys on math tests, they tend to report more positive gender gaps in political interest. (As women’s cultural gender equality is higher, the political interest gender gap is smaller)
Evidence for increasing modernisation
- Female homemakers gradually declines
- Education levels increase across cohorts
- Religious gaps narrowed, especially for church attendance.
BUT even in younger cohorts women are somewhat more religious than men.
Norris and Inglehart
Econ/modernisation
The realignment of gendered voting attitudes is because of the modernisation of society, especially increased female labour force participation, rising education levels, and changes to the traditional family through lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and declining fertility. There is ‘increased female participation in the paid workforce, the break-up of the traditional family, and the transformation of sex roles in the home’
1. ‘Over-time hypothesis’ - since modernisation increases over time, women will move further to the left over time
2. ‘Cross-national hypothesis’ - countries where modernisation is more advanced, the gender gap will be larger
3. ‘Generational hypothesis’ - because the changes to individual’s lives caused by modernisation particularly apply to younger cohorts, they should experience the modern gender gap, while older cohorts retain the traditional gender gap
Criticism of Norris and Inglehart
- the graphical evidence for gender-generation gap pools together all “postindustrial” countries, not all of which are available for all years in the data set used, and so the observed cohort differences could be an artifact.
- only the coefficient for gender, and not its interaction with age or birth year, is included in the regression analysis, despite the fact that they argue the gender gap should be different for older and younger cohorts. Thus neither the existence of, nor the explanations for, a gender-generation gap are tested for in these models.
- their approach adds multiple possible explanatory factors to the model at once, making it impossible to distinguish which features of modernization are the most important.
Norris
Coins ‘gender-generation gap’
