Same blueprint, different bricks: reexamining the sources of the gender gap in political ideology

Abstract

Since the 1990s the ideological gap between men and women has grown, but scholars debate whether this difference is driven by diverging opinion on individual issues or differences in ideological reasoning. Utilizing Item Response Theory, we test for gender differences in multiple aspects of ideological thinking: ideological constraint, stability, the importance of individual issues to ideology, and the degree to which people base their self-reported ideological identity on policy issues. In contrast to existing studies showing that men and women privilege different sets of issues when choosing an ideological label, we find that men and women organize their opinions in much the same way. The gender gap in ideology reflects differences of opinion, but not political reasoning. Our results call for a shift away from research that searches for ways in which men and women reason differently about politics and focuses instead on why ideological thinking is so similar between the sexes despite difference in social experiences and on the elements of gender that explain basic differences in opinion.