Pathways to Political Participation: Gender Differences and Inequalities

• In Event: Motherhood and Politics

Abstract

Do women and men have different modal pathways to political participation? If there are some gender differences in these pathways, do they indicate any gender inequalities? This paper attempts to identify gender disparities in pathways among American youths in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Dataset, I re-examine four major explanatory theories in the literature: family socioeconomic status, higher education, political socialization and personality. The method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) enables me to study every possible configuration of these four theories.
By studying the set-theoretic connections between these configurations and the major outcome of political participation, I first find that women and men follow very different modal pathways. Specifically, socialization with a mother interested in politics was a more important condition in the pathways for female youths to becoming politically active than for male youths. Political socialization with friends fostered male youths’ participation while blocking female youths’ participation. The personality of being opinionated was also an important condition for female youths, but not for male youths.
By comparing these pathways, I also find that gender inequalities in political participation did exist. My results suggest that the recipe of being politically active female youths was more demanding than that of male youths because the former required an additional condition in the pathways given other factors are the same. They also suggest that male and female youths had some common pathways to becoming politically active, but the former had a special pathway that was not shared by the latter. For most configurations, male youths had a higher consistency level of being politically active than female youths.
At last, this paper suggests some new ways of identifying differences and inequalities across genders, races or social classes by examining the number of conditions in the pathways at a certain consistency level, the number of pathways, and the gap in the consistency levels.

Author

• Qin Huang