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8 Sources of Political Unity and Disunity among Women Placing the Gender Gap in Perspective leonie huddy, erin cassese, and mary-kate lizotte The gender gap has become a staple feature of the political landscape during the past several decades. Women have consistently voted in greater numbers than men for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates since the early 1980s.1 They have also expressed greater identification with the Democratic Party over the same time period.2 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan polarized the genders more than other recent presidents had, which carried over into gender polarization on party identification, resulting in the widely broadcast notion of a “gender gap.”3 But women’s political commonality is far from pervasive. Although women are more inclined than men to support Democratic candidates, they do not act as a cohesive political force. Political group unity is typically marked by homogeneity of vote choice among group members and a sharp divergence from nongroup members. Such unity is highly visible among blacks, among whom 80 to 90 percent have supported Democratic presidential candidates in recent elections and have done so to a far greater degree than whites, whose support for Democratic candidates is closer to 40 percent.4 Women do not form a cohesive, unified political force in this way. The gender gap in vote choice between men and women has hovered around ten percentage points over the last several decades, resulting, for example, in 54 percent of women supporting Bill Clinton in 1996 as compared to 43 percent of men, according to exit poll data.5 This is very far from the unanimity exhibited by black voters in recent elections.6 i-xii_1-220_Whit.indd 141 1/10/08 9:17:56 AM 142 . political unity and disunity among women Group-based political solidarity or cohesion is also typically marked by the degree to which a group’s common interests motivate political commonality. But women’s political cohesion also appears weak when examined from this perspective.7 There is no evidence that the electoral “gender gap” reflected political unity among women by originating in a distinctive response to women’s shared interests. In the 1930s and 1940s, women were substantially more supportive than men of liberalized roles for women, particularly their suitability for paid work and political office. However, such gender differences diminished through the 1960s, so that contemporary research typically turns up almost no major gender differences in support for such women’s issues. The gender difference in support for the Equal Rights Amendment, which most explicitly promoted women’s collective interests, was negligible during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was receiving the most publicity and its fate was largely determined. Similarly, much research has shown that men and women have not differed significantly in recent years on other women’s issues, such as whether “a woman’s place” is properly in the home, whether women should be drafted, how much discrimination there is against women, favorability toward women’s organizations, and support for legalized abortion , issues on which both women and men are divided.8 Group members may also evince political cohesion through a greater political emphasis on group-linked issues. But women fail to pass the cohesion test in this respect. Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party took unsympathetic stances on women’s issues in the 1980s, and leaders of the women’s movement were outspokenly opposed to the Reagan administration . So women might well have been more inclined than men to vote for candidates who support women’s issues. But here, too, the evidence suggests disunity rather than solidarity. Klein found large gender differences in the impact of women’s issues on the presidential vote in 1980.9 But others have not found such gender differences. Indeed, Mansbridge refutes the notion that the ERA had greater impact on women’s than men’s vote choice in the 1980 presidential election; the impact of the ERA was minimal among both genders.10 Frankovic reported that support for women’s issues such as the ERA and abortion had about the same small influence on women’s job approval ratings of Reagan as it did on men’s in the 1980–82 era.11 And both Klein and Mueller report no gender differences in 1972 and 1976 surveys.12 The weight of this and recent evidence is against strong gender differences on women’s issues or in their political impact.13 Thus, when taken as a whole, there is little...

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