Gender Equality Mood across States and over Time

Abstract

This article provides a new measure of state-level attitudes toward gender roles. Our series, gender equality mood, spans from 1972 to 2010 and is the first measure to capture variation in gender-role attitudes across states and over time. The series is created using two leading techniques for opinion estimation: multilevel regression and poststratification and survey aggregation. We conclude by discussing several research areas in which our measure of gender equality mood may be especially useful.

Fifty shades of deservingness: an analysis of state-level variation and effect of social constructions on policy outcomes

“…Because one can make state-level estimates of policy-specific public opinion with as little as a single survey, the method has been employed by dozens of scholars studying a wide range of issues, including same-sex marriage (Lax and Phillips 2009a; Lewis and Jacobsmeier 2017), ideology and partisanship Koch 2015, 2013;Pacheco 2011), immigration (Butz and Kehrberg 2016), gender mood (Koch and Thomsen 2017), Supreme Court nominees and decisions (Caldarone et al 2009;Kastellec et al 2010;Franko 2017), income inequality (Franko 2017), roll call voting (Kastellec et al 2010;Kastellec et al 2015;Krimmel et al 2016), the Affordable Healthcare Act (Pacheco and Maltby 2017), smoking bans (Pacheco 2012), abortion (Pacheco 2014), death penalty (Pacheco 2014), and welfare spending (Pacheco 2014), to name a few. In fact, MRP is "emerging as a widely used gold standard for estimating preferences from national surveys" (Selb and Munzert 2011, 456).…”

Legislative Diversity and the Rise of Women Lobbyists

“…First, we include a measure of gender-equality policy mood to account for voters in some states being more open to women’s political representation. We use Koch and Thomsen’s (2017) measure, which is estimated based on survey responses to questions from the American National Election Studies and General Social Surveys. Included in this measure are questions relating to women’s roles in home life and politics, allowing us to capture public receptiveness to female participation and leadership.…”