IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v62y2018i2p249-265.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Gender, Political Knowledge, and Descriptive Representation: The Impact of Long‐Term Socialization

Author

Listed:
  • Ruth Dassonneville
  • Ian McAllister

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruth Dassonneville & Ian McAllister, 2018. "Gender, Political Knowledge, and Descriptive Representation: The Impact of Long‐Term Socialization," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 62(2), pages 249-265, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:62:y:2018:i:2:p:249-265
    DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12353
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12353
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ajps.12353?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marta Fraile & Jessica Fortin‐Rittberger, 2020. "Unpacking Gender, Age, and Education Knowledge Inequalities: A Systematic Comparison," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 101(4), pages 1653-1669, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:62:y:2018:i:2:p:249-265. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.