The Sex Gap in Political Persuading: Where the "Structuring Principle" Works

Abstract

Sex differences in political behavior have decreased significantly over the last 25 years. One of the few remaining differences is in the area of trying to persuade others how to vote. This paper explains this difference from a socialization perspective, arguing that the greater reluctance of adolescent females to express attitudes is a precursor of the greater reluctance of adult females both to express attitudes and to try to persuade others how to vote. The success of this explanation shows that the structuring principle can be usefully applied if the link between preadult and adult attitudes and behavior is sufficiently well-specified. As a field, political socialization has been severely hampered by its failure to address directly the question of how preadult political orientations are linked to adult attitudes and behaviors. Although some researchers (e.g., Easton and Dennis, 1969) have theorized about the impact of childhood on important adult political variables such as diffuse support, they have implicitly assumed, rather than tested, the proposition that childhood attitudes persist and structure later attitudes. The theoretical importance of such tests is obvious. They would specify the conditions under which, and the mechanisms through which, early learning affects adult political variables. We could then specify and study those aspects and periods of the political socialization process which are the most significant for adult attitudes and behaviors. One of the first critics to emphasize the importance of the child-adult link was David Marsh (1971). Marsh, however, had no data with which to test this link, and the problem continued to be ignored for the most part. In fact, Donald Searing and his colleagues (Searing, Schwartz, and Lind, 1973; Searing, Wright, and Rabinowitz, 1976), writing in the 1970s, were unable to find any coherent model of the ways in which early learning either struc

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