Financial Conditions, Gender, and Voting in American National Elections

Previous attempts to locate subgroups of people who are particularly likely to engage in economic voting have examined class differences, levels of political awareness, and salience of economic issues. None of these attempts has shown much difference among groups in their economic voting. This paper explores differences between men and women in their levels and types of economic voting. As predicted, women are considerably less likely than men to cast egocentric economic votes, but are as likely, or perhaps more so, to cast sociotropic economic votes. Since these differences do not appear to be a result of socioeconomic differences between men and women, our findings illuminate an aspect of the gender gap rarely described. Not only are men and women different in many political attitudes, but they also have different ways of using these attitudes to provide a basis for political action.