Gary Andres has a nice piece at the Weekly Standard discussing political science research on the gender gap in voting behavior and public opinion. One key tidbit comes from some research (partial pdf) by Karen Kaufman and John Petrocik:
They also show that much of the gap was caused by men becoming more Republican rather than women shifting toward the Democrats.
The graph above updates one of theirs through 2008 (data here and here).
The important finding is that the gender gap in party identification is entirely due to the changing preferences of men. There is no noteworthy trend among women. I think that finding, which is hardly new, still hasn’t fully filtered into the conventional wisdom.
Andres cites other research, including this new paper (gated, alas) by Paul Kellstedt, David Peterson, and Mark Ramirez, that finds that the preferences of men regarding the role of government are also more labile.
One explanation for the increasing gap between men and women comes from this research (pdf) by Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Suzanna de Boef, and Tse-Min Lin:
We find that from 1979 to 2000, the partisan gender gap has grow when the political climate moved in a conservative direction, the economy deteriorated, and the percentage of economically vulnerable, single women increased.
See their paper for more.
Andres’s ultimate point is that “Mad Men” might be influential in this election, due in part to their greater movement away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republican Party. That may be correct, but it’s important to acknowledge that other subgroups of the population have moved in that direction as well. In fact, nearly every subgroup has moved in that direction, depending on how you capture their attitudes (e.g., party identification, presidential approval, generic ballot, etc.). So we can’t yet conclude the 2010 election will depend on trends among men specifically.
But we do know that Obama and the Democrats in general “overperformed” among men in 2008. If men revert to a more normal pattern in 2010 and women remain consistent in their pattern of support for the two parties, this will go a long way toward fueling Republican gains.
Very good This really is one of the best web sites I’ve ever browsed on this subject.
It is invalid to conclude that one group’s preferences are not changing because the ideological content of party affiliations is changing. The GOP is more conservative and the Democratic party more liberal than they used to be. So unless the share of female Democratic leaners has increased and the share of female Democratic firm identifiers has declined, one would have to conclude that womens’ preferences are changing as well and that is part of the growing gender gap.