Event Report: What Women Want: Voting Preferences in Japan, Britain, and the United States
On February 17th 1:00pm-2:00pm (EST) Gill Steel, a Professor of Political Science at the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Doshisha University located in Kyoto, Japan, delivered a talk about her forthcoming publication “What Women Want: Voting Preferences in Japan, Britain, and the United States.”
Professor Steel’s presentation began with a historical overview of voting trends in the three countries of interest, and discussion about how the idea of common media and academic tropes of a gender gap in voting and policy preferences cannot be explained by a single theory alone. Steel’s research demonstrated that when controlling for differences between men and women’s voting histories in a regression analysis, gender differences in vote choice “disappear”, suggesting that a broader framework is necessary to understand the complexities of how one’s identity impacts politics, one that “moves much further beyond the gender binary.” Steel further explained how focusing on supposed voting gaps between men and women does not actually reveal what women want, with these fixed variables seeing female voters understood as a monolith, limiting female voting preferences to those that further promote her identity as a mother or part of a greater family unit. In order to understand the fluctuations of women’s voting trends, Steel posited that researchers must first contextualize these preferences within broader election and cultural trends in order to move away from viewing this voting bloc as “unidimensional”.
Professor Steel then went on to explain her own reasoning of how gender affects voting preferences, starting with the incorporation of long-term party identification, and how this variable is heuristic and shapes social provision and expectations of the state. With Steel tying party identification to the mechanism of class politics, a greater gender context emerges, and differs, across the three countries of interest. Steel demonstrated several examples of how the visibility of women and political rhetoric can shape the way female voters are understood, with countries like the U.K. purchasing political ads featuring and directed at women, while in Japan LDP party authorized photographs often display little to no female participation in the decision-making process. In her study of American local print media, Steel also revealed trends of women’s issues receiving more attention during times of greater social conscience, however duly noting that this trend does not always last, and can drastically change from one election cycle to the next. Steel went further on to note the importance of symbolic politics on individual voting preferences, with this mechanism being used as a tool by several media and election strategists as a way to subvert the deeper need for understanding voters beyond their gender identity.
Following the presentation, a lively question and answer period was moderated by Professor Phillip Lipscy, the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan. Steel answered questions about if a woman's marital status impacts policy preferences, how election trends observed for female candidates diverge from those of men, and long-term policy implications when promises to sub-groups of women voters are not politically followed through.
We would like to thank Professor Gill Steel for sharing her important research, as well as the virtual audience that was in attendance from around the globe for an engaged Q&A session.
