“Moralism” and the Gender Gap: Judgments of Political Ethics in Japan

Abstract

This article investigates whether women are, as many claim, "moralists"-that is, moral and ethical standard-setters who seek clean politics and have strict standards for public officials. An analysis of data from the 1996 Japanese Elections and Democracy Study survey and from 18 focus groups conducted in 1996 indicates that women in Japan are not moralists. As elsewhere, there is a gender gap in Japan on "issue preference sets," with women favoring a "care" agenda, but women assign political ethics less importance than do men, even though women are more likely to see adverse effects from political corruption. Studying people's judgments of four ethics scenarios reveals minimal gender gaps; controlling for education and age, women's judgments overall are less, not more, strict than men's. Among women, age is a better predictor of moralism than education; older women are stricter than younger women on political ethics. This is attributed to gender-based differences in moral reasoning: Japanese women and men both rely heavily on a "relation-based" frame (which is situation-specific and requires extensive social information), but gender stratification patterns create information inequalities. Younger women lack social information necessary for judging political misconduct, whereas older women overcome the information deficit through life experience.In the world of political science, soccer moms have long been political football: The field has been sharply divided over whether a meaningful gender gap exists in policy preferences and orientation about politics. This article takes the inquiry to Japan and focuses on whether women are, as many have claimed, "moralists"-that is, moral and ethical standard-setters who seek clean politics for the community and have strict standards for the public officials who lead it. I break down the issue into three related questions. First, I seek to verify whether, as much research in the United States and elsewhere claims, a gender gap in Japan does indeed mark women's and men's overall policy preferences and, more specifically, whether

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“…The convergence that we find between men's and women's judgments as they age is construed here as a life cycle effect rather than a generational effect. We argue that women and men gain similar experience and knowledge as they grow older and thus come to view situations similarly (Beutel & Marini, 1995;Pharr, 1998). Further, we argue that this interaction effect between age and judgment is not restricted to men and women in Japan, but can be seen in other advanced democracies (Cohn, 1991;Muhlberger, 2000).…”

“…Wark and Krebs (1996) hinted at this interaction when they argued, "A more interactional model of moral judgment than the models of L. Kohlberg and C. Gilligan is recommended" (p. 220). Pharr (1998) alluded to this effect when she argued that the essential differences in ethical judgment fall between older and younger women. Lyons (1988) explicitly argued that her "findings suggest the possibility of an interaction between the rights and response orientations for women" of different ages (p. 39).…”

“…Education level was held constant at its mean of 1.26 (where "1" represents less than 2 years of college and "2" represents 2 or more years of college); age was allowed to vary. These coding and word choices follow those of Pharr (1998). Our entire set of explanatory variables at this point is X i = {1, A i , G i , E i }, where 1 is a constant.…”

“…We now go two more steps beyond Pharr (1998). Our new set of variables is as follows: age, which has been extended between 18 and 90 (A i ); gender (G i ); and education level, measured as a dichotomous variable, with individuals having either 2 years of college or less (E i ).…”

“…The independent variables were gender, age, and education. These coding and word choices for both Table 1 and Figure 1 follow those of Pharr (1998). Additionally, we use the phrase "gender gap" as it is used in Pharr (1998)-the difference between male and female respondents' answers.…”