TY - JOUR
T1 - Gender, Political Knowledge, and Descriptive Representation
T2 - The Impact of Long-Term Socialization
AU - Dassonneville, Ruth
AU - McAllister, Ian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
©2018, Midwest Political Science Association
PY - 2018/4
Y1 - 2018/4
N2 - Successive studies have found a persistent gender gap in political knowledge. Despite much international research, this gap has remained largely impervious to explanation. A promising line of recent inquiry has been the low levels of women's elected representation in many democracies. We test the hypothesis that higher levels of women's elected representation will increase women's political knowledge. Using two large, comparative data sets, we find that the proportion of women elected representatives at the time of the survey has no significant effect on the gender gap. By contrast, there is a strong and significant long-term impact for descriptive representation when respondents were aged 18 to 21. The results are in line with political socialization, which posits that the impact of political context is greatest during adolescence and early adulthood. These findings have important implications not only for explaining the gender knowledge gap, but also for the impact of descriptive representation on political engagement generally.
AB - Successive studies have found a persistent gender gap in political knowledge. Despite much international research, this gap has remained largely impervious to explanation. A promising line of recent inquiry has been the low levels of women's elected representation in many democracies. We test the hypothesis that higher levels of women's elected representation will increase women's political knowledge. Using two large, comparative data sets, we find that the proportion of women elected representatives at the time of the survey has no significant effect on the gender gap. By contrast, there is a strong and significant long-term impact for descriptive representation when respondents were aged 18 to 21. The results are in line with political socialization, which posits that the impact of political context is greatest during adolescence and early adulthood. These findings have important implications not only for explaining the gender knowledge gap, but also for the impact of descriptive representation on political engagement generally.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85043368815&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/ajps.12353
DO - 10.1111/ajps.12353
M3 - Article
SN - 0092-5853
VL - 62
SP - 249
EP - 265
JO - American Journal of Political Science
JF - American Journal of Political Science
IS - 2
ER -