The Cultural Divide and Changing Beliefs about Gender in the United States, 1974–2010

Abstract

The present paper examines claims of a growing cultural divide in the United States. We analyze social change in beliefs about gender over a period of 36 years (from 1974 to 2010) in the United States using data from the nationally representative General Social Survey (GSS). We find evidence of growing gender egalitarianism until the mid-1990s, with a reversal between 1996 and 2000, and a decline in state differences in beliefs about gender over time in our decomposition analysis and multilevel models. Although we find significant differences in gender beliefs among states in the 1970s based on their voting record on the Equal Rights Amendment and based on patterns of family formation and family life associated with the Second Demographic Transition, these differences among states decreased or disappeared entirely by the early years of the twenty-first century. We highlight the implications of our findings for the ongoing public and academic debate surrounding growing cultural differences among states. Keywords Gender equality. Sex role attitudes. Gender. Gender attitudes. Social change. Cohort analysis. Second demographic transition A growing body of research in sociology and political science has focused on changes in the polarization in mass publics with respect to a range of social and policy-related attitudes and beliefs. James Davison Hunter's (1991, p. 42) book Culture Wars and his introduction of the idea of polarization, in which he used the Bcultural warfare^metaphor to describe the existence in the U.S. of Bpolitical and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding,^set the stage for a substantial amount of research. Recent studies have suggested that culture may be supplanting social class as the major line of demarcation in accounting for party choice and political identities in American politics (see Alwin and Tufis 2016; Frank 2004; Layman 2001). Despite Hunter's (1991) argument, the emerging literature on polarization characterizes these apparent ideological conflicts as

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