Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access published online on January 28, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly, doi:10.1093/poq/nfm056
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Social Roots of the Partisan Gender Gap
Address correspondence to Barry C. Burden; e-mail: bcburden{at}wisc.edu.
I suggest that the gender gap in party identification is dependent on question wording and asymmetric stereotypes about men's and women's partisan preferences. A survey experiment reanalyzes the gender gap by comparing the standard partisan battery to an alternative version that emphasizes feelings rather than thoughts. Bringing question wording into closer alignment with theory causes the gender gap to shrink. This happens in part because the "feel" questions find women to be less Democratic than did the "think" questions. Moreover, reduction of the gender gap occurs mostly among highly sophisticated women and not those usually susceptible to question wording effects. Contrary to popular wisdom, men and women appear to be more, not less, alike politically when feelings are primed.
BARRY C. BURDEN is with Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, 1050 Bascom Mall, 110 North Hall, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Versions of this paper were presented at the 2005 meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, 2004 meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and Southern Political Science Association, and the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop and American Politics Research Workshop at Harvard University. The author thanks Lewis Horner and Gerald Kosicki for assistance with the Buckeye State Poll, Randall Thomas for data from Harris Interactive, Phil Jones, Casey Klofstad, and Michael Kang for research assistance. Alice Eagly, Tammy Frisby, Steve Greene, Nancy Mathiowetz, Todd Rogers, Kay Schlozman, and several anonymous reviewers delivered extremely helpful comments. The Joseph H. Clark fund and Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard University provided financial support.