Asking the Right Questions: A Framework for Developing Gender-Balanced Political Knowledge Batteries

Abstract

Gender differences in political knowledge are a well-known empirical finding in public opinion research. Scholars working in this area have proposed various explanations for this phenomenon, often focusing on issues regarding the format and content of factual knowledge batteries. Yet, there are surprisingly few works that focus on how scholars might diversify the content of political knowledge measures to develop items that are less biased toward male areas of expertise. In this paper, we propose an inductive framework to develop more gender-balanced knowledge batteries by including political issues that are of particular relevance to women and women’s lives. Employing gender-balanced measures of political knowledge reveal instances where women and men demonstrate equivalent levels of political knowledge and higher levels of political interest and efficacy among women—engagement that is often masked by conventional measures of knowledge.

Women Also Know Stuff: Challenging the Gender Gap in Political Sophistication

“…More specifically, examining the types of issues women and men emphasize when discussing their political preferences in open-ended responses can serve as a guide to select new closed-ended item batteries. Building on this argument, Kraft and Dolan (2023a) show that focusing on issues emphasized by both women and men all but diminishes the gender gap in factual knowledge. Thus, researchers could use this heuristic—either by relying on publicly available surveys containing open-ended items, or by fielding them in a pilot study—in order to select gender-balanced knowledge questions for their survey.…”