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Rethinking political thinking: gender and public opinion in Canada

University of British Columbia

This study argues that gender is a significant factor to consider in investigations of political opinions and presents evidence of the relevance of gender to support for various issues and in the social construction of opinion. Moreover, it argues that the patterning of women's and men's opinions, and differences in the sources of those opinions, point to a difference in political cultures: a women's political culture and a men's political culture. Using survey evidence gathered at the time of the 1988 Canadian federal election, the study follows three separate investigative paths in an attempt to uncover the existence of distinctive political cultures. The first path investigates gender gaps in opinions at the time of the election and links these findings to earlier work suggesting the existence of a women's agape ethos, their weaker hawkishness, and their weaker support of continentalism. It is shown that controls for women's lower average incomes, their lesser educational attainment, their greater support of feminism, and gender roles do not fully account for differences in women's and men's attitudes. Moreover, evidence is addressed of women's greater religious fundamentalism, which often works in such a fashion on attitudes as to attenuate gender gaps in opinions. The second path investigates the social structure of women's and men's opinions and finds that despite the similarity of opinion on a number of issues, divergence appears in the sources of opinion. The influence of economic self-interest, age cohort, region, social group memberships, religious fundamentalism and feminism are found to vary between women and men across a number of issues. The third and final path elaborates on opinion structure by the investigation of women's and men's belief systems, that is the connections between various opinions and the manner in which these connections are hierarchical. Although women's and men's belief systems are very similar, the positioning of feininist belief differs by gender. For women, regardless of their level of political sophistication, feminism is connected to the most basic ideological belief, economic liberalism. For men, however, ferninism is only connected with ideological belief among the politically sophisticated. The study links this evidence to the existence of a women's political culture and argues that it stems partially from each gender's socialization, but that it is a culture in transition. The weakening of religious belief generally is likely to result in larger gender gaps in opinion in the future.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-03-17

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6124

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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