Gender and Political Psychology

Zoe Oxley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138302402
• eBook ISBN: 9781317335832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book showcases new work done by gender politics scholars and political psychologists, covering a variety of political psychology topics. These include stereotyping and prejudice, intergroup conflict, social identity, attitude formation, group affinity, group decision-making, anxiety, contextual effects on individual behaviour, and the evolutionary roots of political behaviour. Political psychological insights are applied to address topics of longstanding concern within the field of gender and politics.

Among the citizenry, gender differences in political ideology, responses to partisan conflict, Hispanic identity formation, and symbolic racism are explored. Other chapters pose the following questions relating to female candidates: What have been the effects of state parties' gender-inclusive policies? Who is most likely to gender stereotype candidates? Are general attitudes toward women in political office related to vote choice in specific contests? What are the implications of politicized motherhood? Finally, a set of essays engage a variety of themes related to gender, decision-making rules, and authority in small deliberative bodies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Politics, Groups, and Identities.

Same blueprint, different bricks: reexamining the sources of the gender gap in political ideology^†

Meghan Condon^a and Amber Wichowsky^b

^aSchool of Public Service, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA; ^bDepartment of Political Science, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Since the 1990s the ideological gap between men and women has grown, but scholars debate whether this difference is driven by diverging opinion on individual issues or differences in ideological reasoning. Utilizing Item Response Theory, we test for gender differences in multiple aspects of ideological thinking: ideological constraint, stability, the importance of individual issues to ideology, and the degree to which people base their self-reported ideological identity on policy issues. In contrast to existing studies showing that men and women privilege different sets of issues when choosing an ideological label, we find that men and women organize their opinions in much the same way. The gender gap in ideology reflects differences of opinion, but not political reasoning. Our results call for a shift away from research that searches for ways in which men and women reason differently about politics and focuses instead on why ideological thinking is so similar between the sexes despite difference in social experiences and on the elements of gender that explain basic differences in opinion.

During the 1970s gender differences in ideological identification were small and statistically insignificant. By the 1990s, men were roughly a third of a point more conservative than women on the American National Election Study ideological self-identification scale, a gap as large as the gender gap in partisanship. In the 2000 presidential election, differences in ideological identification were the biggest contributor to the gender gap in vote choice (Kanthak and Norrander 2004). Only two studies have examined the sources of the gender gap in political ideology (Jelen, Thomas, and Wilcox 1994; Norrander and Wilcox 2008). They suggest that men and women construct their political ideology in different ways: social welfare issues are more predictive of ideological identification for men, while gender-specific cultural issues are more predictive for women. And the conventional knowledge in political science is that men are more ideological than women (Converse 1964) perhaps due to greater sophistication, interest, or knowledge. As such, men and women appear as different political thinkers – differing not just in their opinions, but in how they politicize their preferences.

In this paper, we offer a fuller examination of the ideological gap between the sexes, modeling opinion formation, ideological reasoning, and ideological self-identification as related but conceptually distinct processes. Specifically, we treat ideology as a latent trait derived from stated issue positions and estimate it using an Item Response Theory (IRT) model. This “revealed” ideological orientation is best suited to analyzing how different issues and positions contribute to an overall belief structure. This method also eliminates a substantial amount of measurement error, allowing us to test more precisely if men and women differ in how they connect preferences to a left–right dimension or in the degree to which they base their self-reported ideology on policy preferences at all.

This paper makes several contributions to the existing literatures on gender, public opinion and political ideology. First, we find little difference in ideological reasoning, and we show that this similarity is not a new phenomenon. Rather, our results suggest that many of the gender differences detected in previous studies can be attributed to methodological issues. Second, our findings point out a need for gender and politics research to focus on social welfare rather than cultural issues. The gender gap on issues concerning the generosity of the social safety net has grown over the last 20 years. And we find that where differences in ideological reasoning do exist, they are on questions regarding these issues, not culture. We discuss gender differences in prosocial interests as a possible source of these differences. Finally, our model, which looks beyond the simple connections between issues and ideological self-identification, not only speaks to the differences and similarities between men and women, but also to the nature of political ideology more broadly. Although it is not the explicit focus of our paper, we demonstrate a method that could easily be extended to test additional hypotheses about ideological differences among social groups.

Sources of the gender gap

The gender gap in ideological identification has been explained both by differences in issue positions and the ways in which men and women organize those preferences (Jelen, Thomas, and Wilcox 1994; Kanthak and Norrander 2004; Norrander and Wilcox 2008). Norrander (1999) argues that the ideological gender gap has its roots in the gender differences that emerged on multiple issues during the 1970s and 1980s (Norrander 1999).¹ Other research suggests that differences in the salience of positions contribute to the gap. For example, Kaufmann and Petrocik (1999) estimate separate regression models for men and women and, by multiplying the mean values of the independent variables for women by the regression coefficients estimated for men, conclude that the gender gap in partisanship stems from men weighing their social welfare preferences more heavily. They note, “[t]he coefficients calculated for men and women separately in each of the years, represent the differential importance of these issues in shaping their respective votes and party preferences” (1999, 877; see also Kaufmann 2002).² Norrander and Wilcox (2008) include interactions between gender and multiple issue positions to predict ideological self-identification and conclude that “although the differences are small, women are more likely to base their ideological identification on gender-specific social issues than are men, and they continue to be less likely to center their ideological identities on social welfare issues” (520).

In sum, recent studies suggest that women and men construct ideology in different ways, connecting it to different sets of issues and concerns. But statistically significant interactions between gender and opinions may stem from systematic differences in measurement error (Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder 2008) or in the distribution of the explanatory variables. These problems are compounded in models that include multiple separate issue items in the regressions.

Furthermore, these studies model ideological self-identification but then draw conclusions about ideological reasoning. Self-identification (choosing a liberal or conservative label) and reasoning (holding positions constrained by an ideological construct) are distinct psychological processes. The ideological consistency of stated issue positions varies within the mass public (Converse 1964; Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus 1978; Jacoby 1991), and ideological identification is often heavily imbued with symbolic meaning (Conover and Feldman 1981; Sears, 1993) and tells us little about ideological reasoning (Jacoby 2002).

Therefore, in contrast to existing studies of gender and political ideology, we examine reasoning and self-identification separately, treating them as related, but conceptually distinct. To more fully understand the ways in which the political ideologies of the sexes differ, we first untangle the relationships between issue preferences, ideological reasoning, and ideological identification.

But the reasons for findings that point to gender difference are not just methodological. Existing studies largely focus on results that show difference, giving little attention to points of similarity. In part, this reflects publication bias against research with null findings (Gerber and Malhotra 2008), a bias that may be even stronger when gender is the subject of study. Sapiro notes that “[r]esearch on gender and public opinion typically incorporates a subtle bias in favor of finding gender differences, partly because culturally we expect gender differences to occur” (2002, 36). A selective focus on differences may lead us to overlook the significant and substantively meaningful similarities between the sexes, and to misunderstand the role of gender and the roots of the differences that do exist. Such bias is a concern across disciplines. In the psychological literature on gender, there is a similar focus on difference, but Hyde (2005) shows, through a study of effect sizes in multiple meta-analyses, that there is actually more evidence of gender similarity on psychological traits. Archer (2006) argues that the bias toward difference is an artifact of the historical origins of gender research: “the study of sex differences began in an athreoretical way, with the accumulation of studies that happened to include men and women” (638–639). Rather than continuing to search ad hoc for differences, Ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Gender and political psychology
• 1. Same blueprint, different bricks: reexamining the sources of the gender gap in political ideology
• 2. Why partisan warriors don’t listen: the gendered dynamics of intergroup anxiety and partisan conflict
• 3. Americana or Latina? Gender and identity acquisition among Hispanics in the United States
• 4. Untangling the gender gap in symbolic racist attitudes among white Americans
• 5. The unintended effects of political party affirmative action policies on female candidates’ nomination chances
• 6. Who stereotypes female candidates? Identifying individual differences in feminine stereotype reliance
• 7. Making the connection? Attitudes about women in politics and voting for women candidates
• 8. Mothers on the campaign trail: implications of Politicized Motherhood for women in politics
• 9. Why women’s numbers elevate women’s influence, and when they do not: rules, norms, and authority in political discussion
• 10. Women’s agency and voice: a commentary on Karpowitz, Mendelberg, and Mattioli
• 11. Empowerment versus backlash: gender quotas and critical mass theory
• 12. Gendered politics: political psychology at the intersection of the individual and the environment
• 13. Numbers, rules, norms, and authority … but where are the people? Some thoughts on Karpowitz, Mendelberg, and Mattioli
• 14. How group forces demonstrate the malleability of gendered behavior
• Index