Reinterpreting the Gender Gap

Daniel Wirls

147 citations0/0 files storedPublic Opinion Quarterly

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Gender Politics and Representation Electoral Systems and Political Participation Gender and Feminist Studies

Abstract

This study offers an analysis of the recent political differences between women and men that contradicts the conventional description of the “gender gap” in American politics. Beginning with the 1980 elections, the differences between women and men in their opinions on political issues, in voting behavior, and in partisan identification frequently have been portrayed as a result of women's rejection of Reagan and of Republicans and conservative values and their attraction to more liberal political positions and to the Democratic party. This description is misleading and cannot explain the full spectrum of political behavior by the sexes in the 1980s. This analysis argues that the gender gap has been the result of unequal rates of defection by men and women away from liberal values and the Democratic party. Greater movement by men toward conservative positions and the Republican party produced the gender gap. Consequently, the Republicans were never the potential victims but have always been the potential and actual beneficiaries of the gender gap.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 147 citations exist upstream.

References

1960The American Voter. By A. Campbell, P. Converse, W. Miller, and D. Stokes. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1960. Pp. viii, 573. $8.50.)1974Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality.1979The Changing American Voter 1985Women's Gender Consciousness 1982Women and Politics 1977Women as Political Animals? A Test of Some Explanations for Male-Female Political Participation Differences 1984The Polls: Gender and Attitudes Toward Violence

Cited by

1994Social dominance orientation and the political psychology of gender: A case of invariance?2006Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate: Social Identity vs. Ideology 2000Social dominance orientation, anti-egalitarianism and the political psychology of gender: an extension and cross-cultural replication 2000The roles of empathy, anger, and gender in predicting attitudes toward punitive, reparative, and preventative public policies 2010Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent 1997Cultural Conflict in American Politics: Religious Traditionalism, Postmaterialism, and U.S. Political Behavior

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.