American Party Women

Abstract

ArticleTraditionally, women were more politically conservative than men. Yet, in the early 1980s, women began realigning, shifting to the left of men and reversing the gender gap in developed democracies across the globe (BoxSteffensmeier, De Boef, and Lin 2004;Inglehart and Norris 2003). Today, women in the United States are more likely to identify with the Democratic Party, vote for Democratic Party candidates, and hold liberal positions on social issues. Although scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding the gender gap in public opinion, existing research focuses almost exclusively on average differences between men and womenemphasizing women's liberal tendencies and defining women's political identity almost entirely in liberal terms. While women's greater average liberalism is well established empirically, approximately one in four women identify with the Republican Party-a figure that translates into millions of American women who buck this liberal trend (Deckman 2016). Because existing research has focused on average differences between men and women, we know little about sources of heterogeneity among women.Does the gender gap extend to the Republican Party, with Republican women holding more liberal views than their male counterparts? To date, most research about Republican women has focused on the elite level, investigating factors like party structure, activists and donors, conservative women's groups, and candidates for political office (Cooperman and Crowder-Meyer 2015;Thomsen 2015). Comparatively little research has considered the attitudes and issue preferences of Republican women in the electorate. 1 In recent years, the United States has seen a rise in high-profile Republican women running for office and the development of a conservative women's movement (Schreiber 2008(Schreiber , 2014. The surge in conservative appeals to women, coupled with the increased salience of and polarization on "women's issues"-for example, the Mommy Wars and the Republican War on Women-requires that scholars revisit the conventional wisdom about women's political identities.Building on the burgeoning body of research on partisan sorting, we develop expectations regarding the intersection between gender and party. Theories of partisan sorting suggest that women and men sort themselves into the party that best represents their views-such that the AbstractResearch on the gender gap in American politics has focused on average differences between male and female voters. This has led to an underdeveloped understanding of sources of heterogeneity among women and, in particular, a poor understanding of the political preferences of Republican women. We argue that although theories of ideological sorting suggest gender gaps should exist primarily between political parties, gender socialization theories contend that critical differences lie at the intersection of gender and party such that gender differences likely persist within political parties. Using survey data from the 2012 American National Election ...

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