Sorting on Gender Inequality: The Alignment of Gender Inequality Attitudes and Party Identification

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Politics and Gender (Table 13)

Abstract

This paper asks how gender inequality attitudes became embedded within partisan identity in the United States. Rather than privileging either gender-driven or partisan-driven sorting, it conceptualizes the association between gender attitudes and party identification as a historical process of alignment. Drawing on three American National Election Study (ANES) three-wave panel series spanning five decades, I estimate cross-lagged panel models (CLPM) to assess the prospective, bidirectional relationship between gender inequality attitudes and party identification. Although both party identification and gender-inequality attitudes exhibit substantial within-domain stability across all periods, their cross-domain coupling changes markedly over time. In the 1972–1976 panel, cross-lagged effects are weak and inconsistent, indicating that the two orientations largely operated as distinct dimensions. In the 1992–1996 panel, cross-lagged associations emerge but remain uneven across the electorate, varying by levels of political interest. In the 2016–2024 panel, the relationship consolidates into consistent reciprocal reinforcement across intervals and subgroups. These findings demonstrate that the coupling between gender inequality attitudes and party identification is historically contingent rather than temporally invariant, evolving from relative independence to tight alignment, and they clarify how both bottom-up attitude-driven sorting and top-down partisan cueing have contributed to the incorporation of gender inequality into the structure of contemporary partisan identity.

Author

• Gyuho Shin, Stony Brook University