This study argues that gender is a significant factor to consider in investigations of
political opinions and presents evidence of the relevance of gender to support for various
issues and in the social construction of opinion. Moreover, it argues that the patterning of
women's and men's opinions, and differences in the sources of those opinions, point to a
difference in political cultures: a women's political culture and a men's political culture.
Using survey evidence gathered at the time of the 1988 Canadian federal election, the
study follows three separate investigative paths in an attempt to uncover the existence of
distinctive political cultures.
The first path investigates gender gaps in opinions at the time of the election and
links these findings to earlier work suggesting the existence of a women's agape ethos,
their weaker hawkishness, and their weaker support of continentalism. It is shown that
controls for women's lower average incomes, their lesser educational attainment, their
greater support of feminism, and gender roles do not fully account for differences in
women's and men's attitudes. Moreover, evidence is addressed of women's greater
religious fundamentalism, which often works in such a fashion on attitudes as to attenuate
gender gaps in opinions.
The second path investigates the social structure of women's and men's opinions
and finds that despite the similarity of opinion on a number of issues, divergence appears
in the sources of opinion. The influence of economic self-interest, age cohort, region,
social group memberships, religious fundamentalism and feminism are found to vary
between women and men across a number of issues.
The third and final path elaborates on opinion structure by the investigation of
women's and men's belief systems, that is the connections between various opinions and
the manner in which these connections are hierarchical. Although women's and men's
belief systems are very similar, the positioning of feininist belief differs by gender. For
women, regardless of their level of political sophistication, feminism is connected to the
most basic ideological belief, economic liberalism. For men, however, ferninism is only
connected with ideological belief among the politically sophisticated.
The study links this evidence to the existence of a women's political culture and
argues that it stems partially from each gender's socialization, but that it is a culture in
transition. The weakening of religious belief generally is likely to result in larger gender
gaps in opinion in the future.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6124 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | O’Neill, Brenda Lee |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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