Men, Women, and Policy Preferences: The Great Reversal in Partisan Attachment

• In Event: Parties and Partisanship in the US

Abstract

Men, Women, and Policy Preferences:
The Great Reversal in Partisan Alignment

Byron E. Shafer & Regina L. Wagner,
University of Wisconsin & University of Alabama


This paper examines a major social cleavage—sex—in its changing relationship to policy preferences, as this relationship shapes and is shaped by political parties and the partisan attachments of men and women in American society. Some social cleavages come almost pre-packaged in these regards, as with social class and social welfare or racial background and civil rights. Others have less immediate but equally insistent implications, as with religious denomination and cultural values. Yet all three leave substantial room for further impacts from political parties and party attachment.

Sex may be less obvious in its expected relationships. Should men and women ‘naturally’ divide on issues of national security? Is this a further cleavage that might be expected to have intrinsic links to cultural values? Do the lived experiences of men and women cause them to link differently even to social welfare and civil rights? Do all such questions receive different answers at different points in time? Or do all these possibilities merely underline the expanded prospects for differing—and changing—links to policy preferences and political parties that derive from sex as a social cleavage?

Better data coupled with an analytic framework designed to address the changing relationship between social cleavages and policy preferences by way of partisan attachment allow a fresh approach to sex as a social cleavage in American politics. Along the way, it is possible to see the critical mediating role of partisan attachments, accompanied by—indeed producing—a change in the underlying relationship of men and women to the political parties themselves.

Authors

• Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin

• Regina Wagner, University of Alabama