Friday, March 14, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
One of the most consistent findings in the comparative literature on public support for redistributive policies is that women support redistribution more than men. This finding is very stable across a wide array of economies, welfare state types and geographic regions. Where does this gender difference stem from? Several theories will be tested, most importantly: material self-interest – women find themselves in social locations that make it rational for them to be more demanding of state re-distribution; socialization: women learn to be more pro-social and therefore more willing to support re-distribution with one mechanism being the tendency of parents-of-girls to be more leftist. The analysis applies a series of structural equation models to the Danish Survey of Youth from 2010, which is the children branch of a long-running cohort study. It is a unique high-quality data set revealing independent data on re-distributive parents and children from Denmark, a relatively gender-egalitarian society. In the analysis, we will compare siblings within families and families with the same constellation of children and thus disentangle family, gender group and individual effects. The study will yield a better understanding of the social foundation of preferences towards the welfare state in a context that is most conducive to small gender differences, allowing argumentative extensions to less conducive contexts.
