Political learning during the 2000 U.S. presidential election: The impact of the campaign on the gender gap in political knowledge

We examine how political campaigns influence individuals’ levels of correct, incorrect, and don’t know responses and the gender gap in political knowledge during the 2000 American presidential campaign. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), we demonstrate that as the campaign progresses the electorate provides more correct answers and fewer incorrect answers. Moreover, the political campaign significantly reduces (and possibly eliminates) the direct effect of sex on political knowledge. While the political campaign decreases the number of incorrect answers provided by both men and women, the number of correct answers provided by women increases. Our findings highlight the importance of the political campaign in determining relative levels of political knowledge for men and women.     

Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections

The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely on two factors: (1) the importance of these issues to the state's voters and (2) whether gender gaps had been decisive in previous statewide contests. Analysis of exit-poll data indicates that when campaigns focused more on women's issues, women became more likely to vote Democratic while the vote choices of men were unaffected. Thus, campaign strategies do appear to influence the importance of gender differences in voting behavior.     

Gendered Perceptions and Political Candidacies: A Central Barrier to Women's Equality in Electoral Politics

Based on the second wave of the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study, we provide the first thorough analysis of how gender affects women and men's efficacy to run for office. Our findings reveal that, despite comparable credentials, backgrounds, and experiences, accomplished women are substantially less likely than similarly situated men to perceive themselves as qualified to seek office. Importantly, women and men rely on the same factors when evaluating themselves as candidates, but women are less likely than men to believe they meet these criteria. Not only are women more likely than men to doubt that they have skills and traits necessary for electoral politics, but they are also more likely to doubt their abilities to engage in campaign mechanics. These findings are critical because the perceptual differences we uncover account for much of the gender gap in potential candidates’ self‐efficacy and ultimately hinder women's prospects for political equality.     

The gender gap in populist radical-right voting: examining the demand side in Western and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

In most countries, men are more likely to vote for parties of the populist radical right (PRR) than women. The authors argue here that there are two mechanisms that might potentially explain this gender gap: mediation (women's attitudes and characteristics differ from men's in ways that explain the PRR vote) and moderation (women vote for different reasons than men). They apply these two mechanisms to general theories of support for PRR parties—the socio-structural model, the discontent model, and the policy vote model—and test these on a large sample of voters in seventeen Western and Eastern European countries. The study shows that the gender gap is produced by a combination of moderation and mediation. Socio-structural differences between men and women exist, but the extent to which they explain the gender gap is limited, and primarily restricted to post-Communist countries. Furthermore, women generally do not differ from men in their level of nativism, authoritarianism or discontent with democracy. Among women, however, these attitudes are less strongly related to a radical-right vote. This suggests that men consider the issues of the radical right to be more salient, but also that these parties deter women for reasons other than the content of their political programme. While the existing research has focused almost exclusively on mediation, we show that moderation and mediation contribute almost equally to the gender gap.     

Adult roles and the gender gap in political knowledge: a comparative study

The unusual size and persistence of the gender gap in political knowledge is perplexing in comparison to other dimensions of politics. Building on situational explanations of political engagement, this article claims that women’s and men’s specific adult roles lead to an enlargement of the gender gap in knowledge. The present study analyses men and women’s levels of political knowledge at different life stages by means of two unique datasets specifically collected to measure what people know about politics. Findings show that adult roles provide more opportunities for men to gain political knowledge than for women. Furthermore, the comparison of levels of political knowledge in two such dissimilar countries as Finland and Spain suggests that while gender equality policies are successful in tearing down some of the obstacles that hinder women’s contact with the political world, they are still insufficient to completely bridge the gender gap in political knowledge during adulthood.     

Depression and the gender gap in political interest

It is well-documented that women report less interest in politics than men on average. We argue that depression—and the differential strategies used to cope with its symptoms—contribute to this persistent gender gap in political interest. While women tend to rely on rumination when experiencing depression, there is less agreement on men's coping strategies. Depressive symptoms should thus more greatly reduce political interest among women than among men. We analyze data from the European Social Survey and the German GESIS Panel Study. We find some evidence that depressive symptoms, even those that are sub-clinical and short-lived, reduce political interest among women, but have little or no effect on the political interest of men. These findings have implications for political and gender equality, especially with the rising prevalence of depression around the world, and contribute to our understanding of the impact of depression on political engagement.     

Gender-Related Political Knowledge and the Descriptive Representation of Women

Past scholarship has documented that women tend to know less about politics than men. This study finds that political knowledge of one kind—knowledge about the actual level of women's representation—is related to support for having more women in office. Individuals who underestimate the percentage of women in office are more likely than individuals who know the correct percentage to support increasing women's representation. Meanwhile, individuals who overestimate the percentage of women in office are less likely to support increasing women's representation. Ironically, women are more likely than men to overestimate the presence of women in office. I also find that gender predicts support for having more women in office, with women more supportive than men. Women would be even more supportive of electing more women to office if they were as knowledgeable as men about the extent of women's underrepresentation.     

Run,Jane, Run! Gendered Responses to Political Party Recruitment

Many researchers point to gender inequities in party recruitment practices to explain women’s underrepresentation on the ballot. However, there has been little systematic research about how men and women respond to recruitment, so we do not know whether gender-balanced recruitment would actually lead to gender-balanced outcomes. We conduct two studies to address this question. First, in cooperation with a county Republican Party, we identically recruited 5510 male and 5506 female highly active party members to attend a free candidate training seminar. Republican women were half as likely to respond to the invitation as men. Second, we conducted a survey experiment of 3960 voters on the Utah Colleges Exit Poll. Republican men’s level of self-reported political ambition was increased by the prospect of elite recruitment significantly more than Republican women’s, thereby increasing the gender gap vis-à-vis the control. The gender gap in the effect of recruitment on political ambition among Democrats was much smaller. Together, these findings suggest that to fully understand the role recruitment plays in women’s underrepresentation, researchers must understand the ways in which men and women respond to recruitment, not just whether political elites engage in gendered recruitment practices.     

Quotas,women's leadership and grassroots women activists: Bringing women into the party?

Research has consistently shown that women are less likely than men to participate in political parties as members and activists; this participation gender gap has persisted despite narrowing gender gaps in education, employment and in other types of political participation.  Yet while the gaps are widespread, their size varies greatly by country as well as by party.  To what extent do party organizational factors help explain these disparities? More pointedly, are there any lessons to be learned from past experiences about party mechanisms which might help to reduce these gaps? To answer these questions, this study investigates grassroots partisan participation in 68 parties in 12 parliamentary democracies, considering whether factors that have been shown to boost the number of women candidates and legislators are also associated with changing the traditionally male dominance of grassroots party politics.  We find evidence of links between some party mechanisms and higher women's intra-party participation; however, because the same relationship holds for men's participation, they do not alter the participation gender gap. Only greater participation of women in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with smaller grassroots gender gaps. We conclude that parties which wish to close grassroots gender gaps should not rely solely on efforts aimed at remedying gender gaps at the elite level.     

Change and continuity in the ideological gender gap a longitudinal analysis of left-right self-placement in OECD countries

When asked to place themselves on a left-right scale, men and women tend to take different positions. Over time, however ideological gender differences have taken a different form. While women were traditionally more right-leaning than men, from around the mid-1990s onwards they have been found to take positions to the left of men. Using an originally constructed dataset that includes information on the left-right self-placement of more than 2.5 million respondents in 36 OECD countries between 1973 and 2018, I empirically verify how the ideological gender gap has evolved since. The results show, first, that while women have shifted to the left since the late 1970s, the pace of this change has strongly diminished since the late 1990s. Second, there is important between-country variation in the size of the reversal in the ideological gender gap. Third, with the exception of the Silent generation and the Baby-boomers, newer generations of women have not taken more left-leaning positions than generations before them.     

“A Mom First and a Candidate Second”: Gender Differences in Candidates' Self-Presentation of Family

Parenthood carries different consequences for men and women in politics. While the conventional wisdom is that motherhood is a liability for women candidates and fatherhood an asset for men, recent elections have called this idea into question. Specifically, Sarah Palin's candidacy and her cadre of “Mama Grizzlies” suggest that there may be times when motherhood can be an asset. We analyze how men and women present their families to voters by examining the campaign websites of congressional contenders in 2008 and 2010. The results indicate that despite the proliferation of mother candidates, women still tend to de-emphasize their children compared to their male colleagues, who are more likely to showcase their families, most notably in pictures. Moreover, we find that other factors like parental status, age of children, party, chamber, incumbency, and opponent gender also affect differences in candidates' propensity to use their families in campaigns.     

Gender Differences in Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Characteristics-Based and Returns-Based Differences

This study assesses whether gender-based differences in political knowledge primarily result from differences in observable attributes or from differences in returns for otherwise equivalent characteristics. It applies a statistical decomposition methodology to data obtained from the 1992–2004 American National Election Studies. There is a consistent 10-point gender gap in measured political knowledge, of which approximately one-third is due to gender-based differences in the characteristics that predict political knowledge, with the remaining two-thirds due to male–female differences in the returns to these characteristics. The methodology identifies the relative contribution of the predictors of political knowledge to each portion of the gap, and then uses this information to elucidate the underlying sources of the political knowledge gender gap and its prognosis. Education is the characteristic that most clearly enlarges the gap, with men receiving significantly larger returns to political knowledge from education than women. Group membership reduces the gap as women obtain gains in political knowledge from belonging to organizations that do not accrue to men. However, these gains are not sufficient to significantly reduce the gap.

Entering the Arena? Gender and the Decision to Run for Office

A critical void in the research on women's underrepresentation in elective office is an analysis of the initial decision to run for office. Based on data from our Citizen Political Ambition Study, the first large-scale national survey of potential candidates, we examine the process by which women and men emerge as candidates for public office. We find that women who share the same personal characteristics and professional credentials as men express significantly lower levels of political ambition to hold elective office. Two factors explain this gender gap: first, women are far less likely than men to be encouraged to run for office; second, women are significantly less likely than men to view themselves as qualified to run. Our findings call into question the leading theoretical explanations for women's numeric underrepresentation and indicate that, because of vestiges of traditional sex-role socialization, prospects for gender parity in U.S. political institutions are less promising than conventional explanations suggest .     

The Gender Gap in Norwegian Voting Behaviour*

In the period 1957-81 women in Norway voted less frequently for the socialist parties than did men. In most recent years this pattern has changed so that women are now more likely than men to support the socialist bloc. This shift has been especially strong among the younger and the more educated women. In the younger age group the polarization by gender is also very striking; women have moved to the left and men to the right. While changing demographic patterns partially explain the gender gap in voting behaviour, differences in values must also be taken into account. The most consistent finding is that stronger religious feelings among women make them more likely to vote for the Christian People's party. Values that suggest a greater emphasis on human interactions, less emphasis on material goods, and a concern with peace, increase female support for the socialist parties.     

A British Gender Gap? Gender and Political Participation

The Electoral Commission's recently published report Gender and Political Participation captures in a clear and accessible fashion the ways in which gender determines the nature of women and men's political participation in the UK. Analysing existing academic survey research it establishes that there is an overall gender gap in political activism with men more active than women. However, it also finds that there is no gender gap in voter turnout at national, regional, or local elections and that in some political activities, such as signing petitions or boycotting products, women are more likely than men to be active. The report also raises important questions about the consequences - substantive and in terms of legitimacy - of women's lower levels of participation in party politics, and suggests that political parties should ensure that greater numbers of women are elected to our political institutions.     

Gender Stereotypes,Information Search,and Voting Behavior in Political Campaigns

It is still unclear exactly how gender influences vote choice. Using an information processing perspective, we argue that instead of directly influencing vote choice, candidate gender guides the amounts and types of information that voters search for during a campaign, and that effects of gender on vote choice ultimately come from differences in information search influenced by candidate gender. Using two unique experimental datasets, we test the effects of candidate gender on vote choice and information search. We find that subjects change their search based on a candidate’s gender, seeking out more competence-related information about female candidates than they do for male candidates, as well as more information related to “compassion issues.” We also find that evaluations of candidates’ traits and issue positions are important predictors of subjects’ vote choice.     

Entering the men's domain? Gender and portfolio allocation in European governments

While all government portfolios used to be the purview of men exclusively, more and more women are selected to sit around the cabinet table. But under which circumstances do women get appointed to different ministerial portfolios? This article, proposes a theoretical framework to consider how party leaders’ attitudes and motivations influence the allocation of portfolios to male and female ministers. These propositions are tested empirically by bringing together data on 7,005 cabinet appointments across 29 European countries from the late 1980s until 2014. Considering the key partisan dynamics of the ministerial selection process, it is found that women are significantly less likely to be appointed to the ‘core’ offices of state, and ‘masculine’ and ‘neutral’ policy areas. However, these gender differences are moderated by the ideology of the party that allocates them. Women are more likely to be appointed to ‘masculine’ portfolios when a party's voters have more progressive gender attitudes. This theoretical framework and analysis enhances our understanding of women's access to the government, which has important implications for how ministers are selected, as well as how women are represented in the most powerful policy-making positions in Europe.     

The intersection of gender politics and religious beliefs

Traditional understanding has placed conservatism at the intersection of religion and politics and has assumed that this relationship is stronger for women than it is for men. Yet rarely has gender been a principal analytic category in such explorations, and the relationships have not been thoroughly documented. We analyze the 1980 and 1984 National Election Study data and find that religion is not a more conservatizing influence on voting behavior for women than it is for men. Reagan did best with the small group of women fundamentalist believers, and did rather well among highly religious Catholic women. In most other cases the gender gap actually widened with increasing religiosity. Although women are more religious than men, political observers are cautioned that this finding cannot be taken as evidence of women's greater support for conservative candidates.     

Present but Not Accounted For? Gender Differences in Civic Resource Acquisition

We investigate the sources of an important form of social inequality: the social processes by which men and women acquire participatory resources in organizations. In particular, we investigate the extent to which men and women acquire civic skills and are targets for political recruitment within churches. Integrating theory about social interaction within an organizational structure, we hypothesize that the ways in which women gain politically relevant resources from the church are simply different from those of men. Three factors explain the institutional treatment of women in churches: (1) women's political contributions are devalued; (2) women respond to social cues more than men do; (3) women respond to political cues from clergy—especially female clergy—whereas men do not. Our findings of gender differences in civic resource acquisition provide a more nuanced treatment of the mobilization process and have broad implications for the relationship between political difference and participatory democracy .