Party Polarization, Ideological Sorting and the Emergence of the US Partisan Gender Gap

Abstract

This article argues that the modern American partisan gender gap – the tendency of men to identify more as Republicans and less as Democrats than women – emerged largely because of mass-level ideological party sorting. As the two major US political parties ideologically polarized at the elite level, the public gradually perceived this polarization and better sorted themselves into the parties that matched their policy preferences. Stable pre-existing policy differences between men and women caused this sorting to generate the modern US partisan gender gap. Because education is positively associated with awareness of elite party polarization, the partisan gender gap developed earlier and is consistently larger among those with college degrees. The study finds support for this argument from decades of American National Election Studies data and a new large dataset of decades of pooled individual-level Gallup survey responses.

Do Men and Women Have Different Policy Preferences in Africa? Determinants and Implications of Gender Gaps in Policy Prioritization

“…24 See, e.g., Conover 1988Gidengil 1995;Welch and Hibbing 1992. 25 Gillion, Ladd, and Meredith 2014;Inglehart and Norris 2000. 26 Campbell et al 1960;Duverger 1955;Inglehart 1977.…”

Exploring Gender Differences in Support for Rightist Parties: The Role of Party and Gender Ideology

“…However, we know from the extensive gender gap literature that there have been fairly consistent gender differences in ideology across time and place. For example, Gillion, Ladd, and Meredith (2014) contend that party ideological polarization provides a more persuasive account of the emergence of the modern gender gap in the United States (where more women than men support Democratic Party candidates) than either the gender realignment thesis or other accounts that focus on women's changing position in society. They argue that because gender differences in political attitudes and preferences predate the gender gap and have remained relatively stable, they are unlikely drivers of the variation in the gender gap.…”

“…In this article, we attempt to operationalize political ideology in a comparative study of Western European democracies, not using respondents’ own assessments of party ideology (à la Gillion, Ladd, and Meredith 2014) but using external measures of party ideology collected from expert surveys. The use of external measures of ideology allows us to avoid endogeneity problems that may occur should respondents to voter surveys retrospectively align their policy preferences, judgments of party positions and vote choice and is thus is a complement to Gillion, Ladd, and Meredith's innovative approach.…”

“…We hypothesize that the seemingly inexplicable shifting in the power of explanatory factors might be explained by the mediating role of variations in party ideology, with this impacting women's support for parties of the right (Campbell 2016). The immense transformation of gender roles in Western democracies likely provides the most solid foundation for understanding changes in women's political preferences, but how these preferences translate into party support or voting behavior has been, we contend, undertheorized (Campbell 2016; Gillion, Ladd, and Meredith 2014). Accordingly, we explore in the second half of the empirical analysis whether variations in the political ideologies of parties of the right can help explain gender variations in support for these parties across Western Europe.…”

Gen Z, Gender, and COVID-19

“…Keywords: gender gap, Generation Z, coronavirus, party polarization P olitical scientists have long studied the American gender gap in public opinion, finding that women tend to be more liberal than men (Lizotte 2020). Yet women are far from monolithic in their political views, and thus the interplay of ideology and gender in the current era has largely been mediated by elite-level party sorting (Gillion, Ladd, and Meredith 2018). Women and men have largely "sorted" themselves into the parties that best match their policy preferences (men with the Republican Party and women with the Democratic Party).…”