The Political Battle of the Sexes

Exploring the Sources of Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences

Leslie A. Caughell

Sex remains one of the most salient demographic dividing points in American politics today. President Obama has women, particularly unmarried women, to thank for his re-election victory. The gender difference in voter support for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates grew from twelve points in 2008 to eighteen points in 2012. This gender gap in candidate preference likely emerges because of gender gaps in policy preferences. Yet despite much scholarly and popular interest in this topic, the cause or causes of gender gaps in policy preference remain unclear. The Political Battle of the Sexes: Exploring the Sources of Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences examines gender gaps in policy preferences in the United States, outlines their form, and explores their causes.

This work makes four contributions to the literature on gender gaps. First, it provides the first comprehensive look at gender gaps across time and various issue areas completed since the 1980s. Second, it provides a theoretical framework for explaining the causes of gender gap emergence that incorporates both nature (biology) and nurture (socialization) and provides the basis with which to predict the attitudes on which gender gaps will likely emerge. Third, it explores the causes of gender gaps in foreign and social policy, two of the policy domains where gender gaps continue to increase. Finally, it introduces a new way of conceptualizing biology based on emerging research in the hard sciences.

Studying gender gaps remains difficult. Women comprise a very diverse group, and are divided by far more factors than the sex categorization that unites them. However, electoral realities demand that scholars studying political behavior pay attention to sex based differences in political preferences. Women exhibit consistent preference tendencies relative to men, and women remain more likely to show up on Election Day than men. As such, gender gaps have substantial political and practical implications for women in the United States. And while explaining their causes requires drawing from a wide array of fields, ranging from biology to economics, understanding the origins and consequences of gender gaps does much to further empirical research in public opinion and mass behavior.

Lexington Books

Pages: 152 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-2650-0 • Hardback • March 2016 • $102.00 • (£78.00)

978-1-4985-2652-4 • Paperback • September 2017 • $53.99 • (£42.00)

978-1-4985-2651-7 • eBook • March 2016 • $51.00 • (£39.00)

Subjects: Political Science / Women in Politics, Social Science / Gender Studies, Political Science / American Government / General, Political Science / History & Theory

The Political Battle of the Sexes

Exploring the Sources of Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Sex remains one of the most salient demographic dividing points in American politics today. President Obama has women, particularly unmarried women, to thank for his re-election victory. The gender difference in voter support for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates grew from twelve points in 2008 to eighteen points in 2012. This gender gap in candidate preference likely emerges because of gender gaps in policy preferences. Yet despite much scholarly and popular interest in this topic, the cause or causes of gender gaps in policy preference remain unclear. The Political Battle of the Sexes: Exploring the Sources of Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences examines gender gaps in policy preferences in the United States, outlines their form, and explores their causes.

This work makes four contributions to the literature on gender gaps. First, it provides the first comprehensive look at gender gaps across time and various issue areas completed since the 1980s. Second, it provides a theoretical framework for explaining the causes of gender gap emergence that incorporates both nature (biology) and nurture (socialization) and provides the basis with which to predict the attitudes on which gender gaps will likely emerge. Third, it explores the causes of gender gaps in foreign and social policy, two of the policy domains where gender gaps continue to increase. Finally, it introduces a new way of conceptualizing biology based on emerging research in the hard sciences.

Studying gender gaps remains difficult. Women comprise a very diverse group, and are divided by far more factors than the sex categorization that unites them. However, electoral realities demand that scholars studying political behavior pay attention to sex based differences in political preferences. Women exhibit consistent preference tendencies relative to men, and women remain more likely to show up on Election Day than men. As such, gender gaps have substantial political and practical implications for women in the United States. And while explaining their causes requires drawing from a wide array of fields, ranging from biology to economics, understanding the origins and consequences of gender gaps does much to further empirical research in public opinion and mass behavior.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 152 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-2650-0 • Hardback • March 2016 • $102.00 • (£78.00)

978-1-4985-2652-4 • Paperback • September 2017 • $53.99 • (£42.00)

978-1-4985-2651-7 • eBook • March 2016 • $51.00 • (£39.00)

Subjects: Political Science / Women in Politics, Social Science / Gender Studies, Political Science / American Government / General, Political Science / History & Theory

Author

Leslie Caughell is assistant professor of political science and gender and women's studies at Virginia Wesleyan College.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Gender Divide in American Politics
Chapter 2: Theorizing Gender Gaps
Chapter 3: Gender Gaps in American Public Opinion, 1948 through 2008
Chapter 4: Women at War
Chapter 5: Women and Domestic Policy Preferences
Chapter 6: Gender Gaps Moving Forward
References
Appendix A: Gender Gaps over Time
Appendix B: Methodology
Appendix B-1: Predictive Validity of Gender Role Socialization
Appendix B-2: Data, Variables, and Coding
Appendix B-3: Simulation Method
Appendix C: Foreign Policy Figures
Appendix D: Social Policy Figures

Reviews

Caughell provides a comprehensive analysis of the roots of public opinion gender gaps in the US. She demonstrates that for over 60 years, men and women have consistently differed on a broad range of policy issues, but scholars don’t fully understand why those differences persist. Caughell compares four theories for these gender gaps—biological differences, gender role socialization, feminist consciousness, and political knowledge. Caughell demonstrates that all four contribute to preference differences between men and women, depending on the particular policy. Her methods include data simulations and public opinion analysis, using the 2008 National Election Studies as well as the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys. Caughell finds that political knowledge—measured by survey questions and biological factors—is the driving force in shaping foreign policy gender gaps. On the other hand, feminist consciousness and gender role socialization (both measured by survey responses), along with political knowledge, explain gender gaps in social policy preferences. Caughell’s analysis provides a more complex understanding of gender gap politics, opening up opportunities for a wide range of future research. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews

InThe Political Battle of the Sexes, Leslie Caughell strikes a bold move by refusing accounts of political behavior that rely exclusively on either biologistic or sociologistic forms of explanation. Drawing on research that shows that biology and environment reciprocally shape one another rather than being distinct or opposed, Caughell develops and tests a theoretical framework that social scientists can use to explore how social and biological factors together, in concert and over time, give form to the gender gap in different issue domains.The Political Battle of the Sexesis a provocation to social scientists to think in more subtle and complex ways about the categories and concepts that underlie their empirical work.
— Samantha Frost, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign