Rethinking Women's Interests: An Inductive and Intersectional Approach to Defining Women's Policy Priorities

Tevfik Murat Yildirim

British Journal of Political Science, 2022, vol. 52, issue 3, 1240-1257

Abstract: Much of the vast literature on the substantive representation of women takes as its point of departure important a priori assumptions about the nature of women as a group. Calling for a rethink of many of those assumptions, a recent body of work recommends an inductive approach to defining women's interests. In line with this view, this article draws on a recently constructed dataset that codes nearly a million Americans' policy priorities over the past 75 years to explore what constitutes women's interests and whether gender differences in priorities cut across partisan and racial divisions. The results suggest there are consistent gender gaps across a large number of policy categories, with women showing particular concern for policy areas traditionally associated with issues of ‘women's interests’. While in many policy areas women were more likely to share policy priorities with other women than with their male counterparts of the same race or partisan background, the results also document considerable heterogeneity among women in various policy areas, which has major policy implications for the representation of women's interests.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:52:y:2022:i:3:p:1240-1257_14

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in British Journal of Political Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().