Images Versus Issues in the 1984 Presidential Election Differences Between Men and Women

Abstract

Recent accounts of male and female personality development suggest that members of each sex difler in the orientations and capacities they bring to their experience of the political world. This article explores the relative importance of respondents' images of the candidates and respondents'political positions to predictions of males'and females' candidate preferences. It was predicted that candidate images bused on interpersonal communication behavior, as opposed to respondents'political positions, would be a more powerful predictor offemales'candidate preferences. The opposite pattern was expected to be thecase for rnales'candidate preferences. These predictions weresupported; however, the data analysis also indicated that both candidate images and political positions contributed significantly to predictions offemales'candidate preferences.

The gender gap: Differences in political attitudes and social dominance orientation

“…Although some have hypothesized that men and women consider different kinds of information when making political decision (e.g. Harrison, Stephen, Husson & Fehr, 1991; for a review of opinion polls that contradict this hypothesis, see Shabad & Andersen, 1979), we expected the relation between perceived policy attitudes and candidate choice to be the same for men and women. Considering only participants who voted for Bush or Clinton and had complete data (N = 31 l), we computed two correlations: the correlation between each participant's opinions on the policies and his or her belief in Clinton's support across the nine policies, and the correlation between each participant's opinions and his or her belief in Bush's support across the nine policies.…”

Experimental Tests of an Attitudinal Theory of the Gender Gap in Voting

“…It is possible that men and women differently weigh these other features of candidates. In particular, the idea that women are more attentive than men to candidates' personality characteristics and men to their policy positions (e.g., Harrison, Stephen, Husson, & Fehr, 1991) is of interest but would require experiments presenting information about such characteristics as well as their policy positions and political party.…”

Who let priming out? Analysis of first- and second-level agenda setting effects on priming

“…In relation to this, McCombs and Shaw's (1972) seminal study examined the correlation between the 1968 presidential election news coverage and the voters' thinking, and several subsequent studies followed a similar track (Shaw and McCombs, 1977;Weaver et al, 1981). Even adopting more complicated concepts and methods, many other agenda setting studies dealt with political events (Ansolabehre et al, 1993;Harrison et al, 1991;King, 1997). The theory, however, made a huge leap in explaining media effects when the research topic was diversified into various issues.…”