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25 October 2005

Republican Hearts and Democratic Minds?

When asked which party they feel they are, women are more likely to identify as Republicans than when they are asked which party they think they are. This is an effect that is virtually nonexistent among male respondents. The effect is largest among high information women. These are the provocative findings that Barry Burden presented from his paper entitled The Social Roots of the Partisan Gender Gap at the American politics research workshop on Monday. Here is the abstract:


I suggest that the gender gap in party identification is partly an artifact of question wording and asymmetric stereotypes about men and women’s partisan preferences. The Michigan model holds that party identification is fundamentally affective, yet surveys have always asked respondents to “think� when answering. The literatures on gender, identity, and stereotypes suggest that this slippage could be quite consequential. A new survey experiment reanalyzes the gender gap by comparing the standard partisan battery to an alternative version that emphases feelings rather than thoughts. Bringing question wording into closer alignment with theory causes the gender gap essentially to disappear. This happens because the “feel� questions find women to be less Democratic than did the “think� questions. Moreover, the disappearance of the gender gap occurs mostly among highly sophisticated women not those usually susceptible to question wording effects. Contrary to popular wisdom, men and women appear to be more, not less, alike politically when feelings are primed. Taken together, the findings raise new questions about why the gender gap emerged at all.

In a randomized experiment, one group of respondents is asked: “Generally speaking, do you usually feel that you are a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?� The other group is asked the standard NES question wording: “Generally speaking, do you usually think that you are a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?� Comparing the two, we find that the gender gap shrinks dramatically among the feel group (see Table 2 in the paper).

Aside from being empirically very interesting, these findings have important ramifications for survey research. As Barry points out: "Though the original conceptualization [of party identification by the Michigan school} stressed affect, surveys questions focus respondents on their thoughts" (p. 3).

Workshop participants brought up some interesting points:

  • The survey was conducted shortly after 9/11 ("late 2001", p.19 ). Even though it is a randomized experiment, the effect of the question wording could be conditional on both gender and 9/11. The psychology literature that Barry references could suggest that the the question framing activated post-9/11 fears of terror and approval of the President but only among women -- and this is what led to the bump in Republican identifiers.
  • The partisan gap exists in terms of party ID as well as voting. What are the implications of the findings if the effect can't be achieved in an NES survey or in the polling both? Barry brought up the interesting possibility research that gender differences might be observed in a vote-by-mail election.

This is a very interesting piece of research, and I look forward to see where Barry goes with it (maybe he will make a post telling us).

Posted by Andrew Reeves at October 25, 2005 7:58 PM

Comments

Has any similar work been done on the affect of "feel" versus "think" in ideological self-identification analagous to the study of partisan self-identification reported in this paper? If I understand correctly, at least some NES designs (including, I believe, the NES 2002 pre-election survey) use the term "think" in the question.

Posted by: Kevin at October 26, 2005 2:46 PM