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Macroideology, Macropartisanship, and the Gender Gap Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. De Boef, Suzanna Lin, Tse-Min Uploaded 08-19-1997 Keywords Gender gap macropartisanship macroideology fractional integration Granger causality Abstract Ever since the late 1970s, women have been significantly more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than man. Explanations of the phenomenon usually link the rise of the gender gap to the political swing to conservatism and its attacks on the welfare state. We propose to study this linkage by way of examining time series data aggregated from CBS News/New York Times National Surveys. Specifically, we propose to test two alternative perspectives that predict such a linkage: that women are more compassionate than men and that women are more welfare-dependent than men. On the basis of these perspectives, we develop hypotheses concerning the causality between the gender gap in macropartisanship and conservative macroideology. We apply Granger causality tests after fitting the appropriate AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) models to the relevant time series. Our findings confirm that the aggregate partisan gender gap since the late 1970s has been a direct response to the dynamics of conservative macroideology. While feminine compassion may be a universal factor, the evidence for its influence behind the gender gap is most prevalent among partisans who are less welfare-dependent. Among welfare-dependent partisans, our evidence suggests that self- interested behavior is more apparent.

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Is There a Gender Gap in Fiscal Political Preferences Alvarez, R. Michael McCaffery, Edward J. Uploaded 08-12-2000 Keywords Gender gap fiscal politics taxation budget surplus multinomial logit missing data imputation framing survey experiments Abstract This paper examines the relationship between attitudes on potential uses of the budget surplus and gender. Survey results show relatively weak support overall for using a projected surplus to reduce taxes, with respondents much likelier to prefer increased social spending on education or social security. There is a significant gender gap with men being far more likely than women to support tax cuts or paying down the national debt. Given a menu of particular types of tax cuts, women are marginally more likely to favor child-care relief or working poor tax credits whereas men are marginally more likely to favor capital gains reduction or tax rate cuts. When primed that the tax laws are biased against two-worker families, men significantly change their preferences, moving from support for general tax rate cuts to support for working poor tax relief, but not to child-care relief. One of the strongest results to emerge is that women are far more likely than men not to express an opinion or to confess ignorance about fiscal matters. Both genders increase their ``no opinion'' answer in the face of priming, but men more so than women. Further research will explore this no opinion/uncertainty aspect.

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Gender and Tax Alvarez, R. Michael McCaffery, Edward J. Uploaded 02-17-1999 Keywords taxation gender gender gap marriage penalty probit issue preferences Abstract This paper addresses two empirical questions in the literature on taxation and law. The first is whether women support redistributive tax policies more than men do. The second is why there exists a strong bias in the current tax code against modern, two-earner families, a bias which is usually understood as falling primarily on women. Our analysis of data from the 1996 presidential election suggests a single answer to both questions. Women and men often answer direct survey questions about their attitudes towards matters of tax similarly, while continuing to show a marked gender gap in their actual voting behavior when tax is one of several issues to be considered.

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Explaining the Gender Gap in the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election Alvarez, R. Michael Nagler, Jonathan Chaney, Carole Uploaded 00-00-0000 Keywords voting elections gender-gap women GEV Abstract This paper compares the voting behavior of women and men in the 1992 presidential election. We show that consistent with behavior in previous elections, women placed more emphasis on the national economy than men, and men placed more emphasis on pocketbook voting than women. We also show that while the difference between men and women's preferences and emphasis on no single issue explains the significant gender-gap in vote-choice; a combination of issues examining respondents views on the economy, social programs, military action, abortion, and ideology, can explain almost three-fourths of the gender-gap.

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Explaining the Gender Gap in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1980-1992 Chaney, Carole Alvarez, R. Michael Nagler, Jonathan Uploaded 08-22-1996 Keywords presidential elections gender gap issue voting economic evaluations general-extreme value model Abstract This paper compares the voting behavior of women and men in presidential elections since 1980 to test competing explanations for the gender gap. We show that, consistent with prior research on individual elections, women placed more emphasis on the national economy than men, and men placed more emphasis on pocketbook voting than women. We add evidence showing that women have consistently more negative assessments of the economy than do men, suggesting that a part of what has been considered a Republican-Democratic gender gap is really an anti-incumbent bias on the part of women. Our multivariate analysis demonstrates that neither the differences between men and women's preferences nor emphasis on any single issue explains the significant gender gap in vote choice; but that a combination of respondent views on the economy, social programs, military action, abortion, and ideology can consistently explain at least three-fourths of the gender gap in the 1984, 1988, and 1992 elections. We also clarify the interpretation of partisan identification in explaining the gender gap.