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The Gender Gap: Turnout
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The Gender Gap in US Politics
In this course, Dr Tessa Ditonto (Durham University) explores the gender gap in US Politics and electoral behaviour. In the first module, we introduce the concept of the gender gap and discuss how this relates to turnout in US elections. Then, in the second module, we discuss the gender gap and electoral choice (ie. how women and men vote in US elections), covering key statistics on 2016 and 2020. In the third module, we explore the origins of the gender gap, before turning in the fourth module to explore the existence of a gender gap outside of elections, including the gender gap as it pertains to women candidates and the concept of baseline gender preference. In the fifth and final module, we explore some of the consequences of the gender gap, focusing in particular on how the gender gap affects how political candidates campaign. Throughout, we underline the heterogeneity of women as a group and the importance of other demographic factors, beyond gender, in affecting how people vote in US elections. This course is particularly relevant to the US Politics section of the AQA and Edexcel A Level Politics specifications.
The Gender Gap: Turnout
In this module we introduce the concept of the gender gap, focusing in particular on: (i) the role of gender in determining an individual’s political attitudes and behaviours; (ii) the limitations of gender in determining an individual’s political attitudes and behaviours, especially given the fact that women are a heterogeneous group; (iii) the claim that women are largely not a solid voting bloc, and the importance of other factors (e.g. ethnicity, region) for voting behaviour); (iv) the history of women’s electoral participation; (v) 1980 as an important shifting point marking the emergence of the gender gap, particularly with regard to turnout; (vi) possible reasons for increase in women’s turnout at elections.
Hello.
00:00:05My name is Tessa de Tanto,
00:00:06and I'm an associate professor of gender and politics in
00:00:08the School of Government and international affairs at Durham University.
00:00:10In today's course,
00:00:13we're going to be talking about how gender can
00:00:14impact on voting behaviour in the United States,
00:00:16and we're going to focus on something specifically called the Gender Gap.
00:00:19So in the United States,
00:00:23we know that the groups that people belong to and the identities
00:00:25that they hold can have an impact on how they vote,
00:00:28how they think,
00:00:32how they feel about politics and how they act in the political world as well.
00:00:33So things like race, ethnicity, religion, age, social class.
00:00:36Uh, these things can all play a role in how people think, feel and act politically.
00:00:41And gender is one of these identities that can play
00:00:46a role in how people behave within the political sphere.
00:00:49Um, we know that in the aggregate,
00:00:53men and women can and often do approach politics in different ways.
00:00:55So this idea that men and women behave differently in the political world,
00:01:01at least in the aggregate, um,
00:01:05is often referred to as the gender gap or as a gender gaps,
00:01:07as there are multiple ways that men and
00:01:11women might differ in their political behaviour.
00:01:13Um,
00:01:16so the most well known of these gender gaps
00:01:17has to do with voting behaviour and vote choice specifically
00:01:19so the fact that women tend to support the Democratic
00:01:23Party and men tend to support the Republican Party.
00:01:26But there are also several other important gender gaps that
00:01:30will talk about during our discussion today as well.
00:01:33Um,
00:01:37and it's important to note that while there is some truth to this
00:01:38notion that there are gender gaps in political attitudes and behaviour and voting,
00:01:40um that oftentimes these differences can be exaggerated.
00:01:46And if we kind of look at the gender gap slightly differently,
00:01:50it can become quite quite a lot smaller or might even disappear.
00:01:53So we're going to talk a lot today about sort of what the gender gap looks like,
00:01:58but also how various nuances can affect our understanding
00:02:02of how men and women might approach politics.
00:02:07So as an illustration of that right,
00:02:11women make up 50 to 51% of the United States population.
00:02:13That means they're a massive group, right?
00:02:18Lots of lots of women in the United States.
00:02:21Um, and they are a very heterogeneous group as well.
00:02:23Um,
00:02:27so the reality is that even though there are some differences in in the aggregate,
00:02:28if we look systematically at men and women as big groups, um,
00:02:33that the women are quite heterogeneous group And there's quite a lot
00:02:37of variation in terms of how different groups of women approach,
00:02:40approach the political process and how they vote and how they think about politics.
00:02:43So oftentimes,
00:02:47there is a lot more similarity by these
00:02:49other group memberships than there is by gender.
00:02:51By and large, women don't tend to vote as a bloc.
00:02:54And so by that I mean,
00:02:57women don't tend to vote as a large group
00:02:58with sort of shared common interests and shared,
00:03:01um, desires about politics.
00:03:04They're much more likely to vote with other social groups, such as racial group,
00:03:06ethnic group, religious group, these sorts of things.
00:03:11Um, so women largely are not voting as a block,
00:03:14though this idea of a gender gap has emerged over time, and sometimes it's bigger,
00:03:18sometimes smaller depends what kind of gap we're talking about.
00:03:23Um, but largely it's It tends to be quite a small
00:03:27a small gap.
00:03:31So women got the right to vote in 1920.
00:03:32And there was a really large and very influential movement in
00:03:36the United States to get women the right to vote.
00:03:41And it was comprised primarily of women.
00:03:43Um, and other allies, um, and they worked for decades, right to win the right to vote.
00:03:45And one of the arguments against giving women the
00:03:50right to vote by opponents of the suffrage amendment
00:03:53to the US Constitution was that some groups were
00:03:57afraid that women would vote as a bloc,
00:04:01that they would vote as a whole and that that
00:04:03would fundamentally alter the political landscape in the United States.
00:04:05Turns out that didn't happen, right?
00:04:09So after women won the right to vote, many of them didn't vote for a long time,
00:04:11and women did vote.
00:04:16Oftentimes again, they weren't voting as a group.
00:04:18They were voting according to other interests and other group memberships.
00:04:20Um,
00:04:24so there really weren't any meaningful differences in the way
00:04:25women and men voted for a really long time,
00:04:27really for 60 years,
00:04:30and it wasn't until 1980 that we started to see differences emerge by gender
00:04:31So what? Gaps actually exist, right?
00:04:37So I've been talking a lot about the gender gap in vote choice. Right?
00:04:40Um, but there are many other gender gaps as well.
00:04:44There are gaps in terms of how likely women and men are to vote
00:04:47and how likely they are to participate in other kinds of political activities.
00:04:51Um, there are differences, of course. And how they actually do vote.
00:04:56Um, there are differences in public opinion, right?
00:04:59So there are differences in the aggregate in terms
00:05:03of how they feel about different policy issues,
00:05:05especially those related to social welfare issues and
00:05:08the use of military force and violence.
00:05:12And we'll talk about that a bit later.
00:05:14Um, and there are also differences in party support and ideology, right?
00:05:16So the political parties they tend to belong to
00:05:20and the ideologies they tend to hold and again,
00:05:23those though these gaps do exist, Um, they are quite small, right?
00:05:25And so it's important to keep that in mind as we go along.
00:05:30All right, so we'll start by talking about the gender gap in voting.
00:05:33Um,
00:05:37and then we'll talk about some of these other gender gaps and more detail a bit later.
00:05:38So the gender gap in voting actually is two different gender gaps.
00:05:42So the first has to do with turn out to vote.
00:05:46And so, by turnout, I mean,
00:05:49who decides to actually go to the polls on Election Day and cast their
00:05:51ballot for whichever offices happened to be on the ballot at that time.
00:05:55So since 1980 women have actually turned out to vote in higher numbers than men do.
00:06:00Um, so this wasn't the case for a very long time, as I just mentioned right?
00:06:06Sort of right after getting the right to vote, many women did not vote.
00:06:10And so the percentage of women of sort of eligible women turning out
00:06:14to vote was much lower than men for quite a long time.
00:06:17But since 1980 it's actually been higher,
00:06:20so it starts it out as sort of less than
00:06:23a percentage point and over time has gotten bigger.
00:06:26In recent years, it's been between three and 4% points, so in real numbers,
00:06:29that means between four and seven million more women are turning
00:06:34out to vote in presidential election years than men are.
00:06:38So those are that's pretty. Those are pretty big numbers, right?
00:06:42Particularly because in the United States, turnout is generally quite low.
00:06:45Um, so even in like a presidential election year,
00:06:50which are the election years that tend to get the most participation by voters,
00:06:53really, only between 55
00:06:5865% of registered voters tend to turn out to vote.
00:07:00So we're talking about 4 to 7 million extra votes from women.
00:07:04Um, that can often be really sort of big deal to campaigns and two candidates,
00:07:09and that has important implications for how
00:07:13candidates and campaigns approach women voters.
00:07:16And we'll talk about that toward the end of our discussion today.
00:07:19So importantly, this turnout gap, um,
00:07:22act does hold for all racial and ethnic groups.
00:07:25It holds, uh, for just about all age groups except for people 76
00:07:28older.
00:07:33So, aside from sort of the oldest voters, um,
00:07:34women are voting more than men across the age spectrum,
00:07:37across the sort of different racial and
00:07:40ethnic groups across religions across social class.
00:07:43Right? So this this trend or this pattern right, this gap tends to be quite robust.
00:07:46Um, and it tends to be true, sort of no matter how we slice up the data,
00:07:51which isn't always true for all the other gender gaps we talk about.
00:07:55But this one seems pretty consistent.
00:07:58Um, it also exists in other kinds of elections.
00:08:01So we tend to focus on presidential elections in
00:08:03the United States because they get the most attention,
00:08:06certainly from the media.
00:08:09They get the sort of most numbers of voters turning out.
00:08:10Um, but we have other elections as well.
00:08:14Um, and it seems that the gender gap holds in those sorts of elections, too.
00:08:16So this is one element of the gender gap in voting. Is this turnout?
00:08:20So why is that the case? Why are women more likely to turn out than men?
00:08:24It's a good question. Um, and scholars aren't completely sure that some ideas.
00:08:29Right.
00:08:33Um, so we know that, uh,
00:08:33women started to vote more than they had been in
00:08:361980 or around 1980 largely because of the feminist movement,
00:08:40because of changes in society and the economy that were happening around then, Um,
00:08:45in terms of more women entering the labour force, entering higher education,
00:08:50um, working outside the home, these sorts of things.
00:08:54And so when sort of these economic and social changes started to happen.
00:08:57Women also started to, um, participate more in the political world as well.
00:09:00What were less certain about is why women actually vote more than men do. Right?
00:09:05Um, there is a theory that it might be about civic duty or civic responsibility.
00:09:11So the idea that women are more likely to see voting as a responsibility and
00:09:16something that they should do as a quote unquote good citizen of the United States,
00:09:23And so there is some evidence that that might be a part of it.
00:09:27But honestly,
00:09:30we don't have a great explanation as to why women are
00:09:31turning out to vote so much more than men are.
00:09:34
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ditonto, T. (2022, September 07). The Gender Gap in US Politics - The Gender Gap: Turnout [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/us-politics-the-gender-gap
MLA style
Ditonto, T. "The Gender Gap in US Politics – The Gender Gap: Turnout." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 07 Sep 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/us-politics-the-gender-gap