Gender Differences and Parental Socialization Effects in Deliberative Democracy

• In Event: Gendered Attitudes and Women’s Interests

Abstract

In line with normative frameworks of deliberative democracy, democratic political systems are more than just elections, majorities, and representation. Instead, they highlight the importance of deliberative interpersonal communication for a sustainable and functioning democratic society. Core prerequisites for beneficial outcomes in deliberative democracies are individuals’ well-reasoned arguments about societal conflicts, resulting from their discursive engagement with each other. For these outcomes to manifest, political discussions must be accessible to all members of society to ensure a diversity of thoughts and the inclusion of different perspectives. Hence, models of deliberative democracy emphasize the importance of citizens’ equal access to and engagement in deliberative conversations. Against normatively desirable patterns, empirical political research has highlighted severe disparities in terms of participation in these conversations between different groups in society, including stark differences between genders. Next to participatory differences in formal settings, such as town-hall meetings, differences are also apparent in settings of informal communication, such as everyday political talk. In this paper, we investigate whether differences in parental socialization are responsible for the variation of individuals’ engagement in deliberative talk and whether varying effects themselves are responsible for differences between genders. This is of special interest since the costs associated with engagement in everyday talk are comparatively small. We argue that this difference in deliberative participation needs to be put in the context of personal experiences and socialization. The present paper links arguments on childhood socialization and observed differences between genders in terms of deliberative participation. We hypothesize that men and women react differently to conversational practices they have been exposed to in their parental homes. We use individual-level data from a unique German local survey project. Ensuring high data quality with random sampling of residents and face-to-face interviews, the survey offers a comprehensive set of variables focusing on deliberative practices of citizens. This allows for the exploration of a variety of dependent variables tapping into individuals’ experiences of everyday talk with one another. Additionally, the data allow us to include multiple measures of experienced parental socialization and to link these experiences to present-day communicative behavior. The results indicate that socialization has a substantive effect on engagement in conversational practices, but this impact differs by gender. While men benefit from childhood learning about engagement in deliberative practices, such parental socialization impacts are substantively lower for women. Overall, this paper emphasizes that inequality between genders in the realm of political participation is not merely a question of entry barriers and costs. Instead, we observe that differences in engagement are deeply rooted in individuals’ experiences and developments. Promoting equality and diversity in the context of deliberative democracies, therefore, requires a profound analysis and understanding of the origins and mechanisms behind inequalities between genders.

Authors

• Manuel Neumann, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research

• Christiane Grill, University of Mannheim