Gender and the Psychological Structure of Partisanship

Previous studies have demonstrated myriad ways in which men and women differ in political attitudes and political behavior. Particularly prominent in recent years is the gap in party identification between men and women. In this paper, rather than examiningsimple party preferences, we explore the underlying psychology of partisanship and how it varies between men and women. We conceptualize party identification as not just an affective attachment to party, but rather as a complex attitude consisting of affective, cognitive, and social identity components. Using a random survey of voters in a metropolitan, midwestern county, we compare men and women on the psychological bases of their partisanship as well as the separate positive and negative aspects of their partisan attitudes. As compared to men, women are found to have uniformly lower evaluations of the parties, resulting mainly from relatively less positive feelings and cognitions. We also find that the group component of partisanship, social identification, plays a significant role in the partisanship of women, but not men. We conclude that men and women may have a gender gap not only in which parties they relate to, but also in how they psychologically relate to those parties.