Explaining the Persistence and Eventual Decline of the Gender Gap in Voter Registration and Turnout in the American South, 1956-1980

Abstract

Recent studies of the gender gap in politics tend to focus on candidate choice rather than registration and turnout. This shift in focus away from gender inequality in political participation may he due to rhe finding in several studies of U. S. voting hehavior since Î980 that différences in rates of registration and voting between men and women are modest and not statistically significant after controlling for traditional predictors of participation. However, we argue that researchers have overlooked the substantial gender gap w registration and voting in the South. While the gender gap in participation virtually disappeared outside the South hy the 1950s, substantial gender differences in ' rates of voter registration and turnout remained in the South throughout the 1950s and l9ñ0s. We test several explanations for the persistence of the gender gap in registration ami voting in the South in the ¡950s and ¡9ôOs and why it began to decline in the 1970s. These explanations include female lahor force participation, resources, mobilization, and political engagement. Using American National Election Studies data for every presidential election year from 1956 to 1980. we employ heteroscedastic probit models within a cross-classifted multilevel age-period-cohort framework to examine the declining gender gap in voter registration and turnout in the South. The results indicate that the decline of the gender gap is due to converging rates of political engagement and employment for women and men in the South during this time period. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications.Sociat Science History .'i4:2 (Summer 2010)

Racial Differences in the Gender Gap in Political Participation in the American South, 1952–2004

“…Based on this framework, we expect that the gender gap among African Americans in the South will be small during the pre-VRA period . For southern whites, we expect that gender differences will be large in the 1950s and the 1960s and much smaller after 1970, which would be consistent with research on registration and voting in the South (Fullerton and Borch 2008;Fullerton and Stern 2010). Explanations for these differences should be due primarily to employment and political engagement.…”

“…Among southern whites, women voted at lower rates than men in the 1950s and the 1960s primarily because they were not registered to vote. As we show in another study, this is mainly due to gender differences in political engagement and employment in the South during this time period (Fullerton and Stern 2010). However, there is a much different pattern for other forms of participation.…”

“…Cassel (1979) and Burns et al (2001) have shown that from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s there were gender and racial gaps in political participation, with 57 percent of women voting. Although the gender gap was reduced by the 1980s, studies have shown that there were different patterns in the northern and the southern United States (e.g., Fullerton and Stern 2010). Yet we have shown here that the gender gap in political participation specifically in the South varied significantly by race as well.…”

“…However, most African American women were still disenfranchised due to Jim Crow-era suffrage restrictions in southern states, and white women did not begin participating in politics at rates equivalent to men for several decades. Although men's and women's voter registration and turnout rates converged in the non-South by the mid-1950s, a gender gap in political participation persisted in the South for several more decades (Fullerton and Stern 2010). For instance, only 57 percent of southern women reported voting in presidential elections between 1956 and 1976, which was substantially lower than other marginalized groups outside the South, including African Americans (73 percent) and those with low incomes (69 percent) or less than a high school education (71 percent) (Sapiro et al 2004).1 Although scholars have noted the low rates of voter turnout among southern women in the 1950s and the 1960s (Black and Black 1987: 176;Campbell et al 1960: 485;Cassel 1979: 913;Stanley 1987: 65), the explanations for this southern gender gap have been primarily speculative, and differences by race and type of political activity have not been systematically examined.…”

“…What is more, researchers have given scant attention to the intersection of gender and race when considering these issues longitudinally. Although previous research points to women's increasing political engagement as a reason for the declining southern gender gap in voter registration and turnout in the 1970s (Fullerton and Stern 2010), potential racial differences in the southern gender gap and different forms of political participation remain understudied. Therefore in this study we focus on the intersection of gender and racial differences in several forms of political participation in the South over time from 1952 to 2004.…”