The gender gap in voting dates back 2 generations or more and may now be in double digits.
A large share of all social spending is for the care of dependents – everything from children to non-working mothers and old age pensioners. Women support this spending because they benefit more from the social insurance it offers. Women both earn less and are more likely to be out of the workforce caring for children. Women also change their voting patterns more often than men as they marry and divorce or as they become single mothers.
John Lott pondered on why the government started growing precisely when it did. The federal government, aside from periods of wartime, consumed 2 to 3% of GDP up until World War I. In the 1920s, non-military federal spending began steadily climbing. FDR’s New Deal continued an earlier trend.
Lott explains the growth of government with women’s suffrage. For decades, polls have shown that women as a group vote differently than men. Without the women’s vote, Republicans would have swept every U.S. presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004.
A major gender gap issue is smaller government and lower taxes, which is a much higher priority for men. Women were more opposed to the 1996 federal welfare reforms, which mandated time limits for receiving welfare and imposed work requirements on welfare recipients.
Women are also supporters of Medicare, Social Security and educational expenditures more than men. Studies show that women are generally more risk-averse than men so they support government programs to ensure against certain risks in life.
- Women’s average incomes are also slightly lower and less likely to vary so single women prefer more progressive income taxes.
- Once women marry, they bear a greater share of taxes through their husbands’ relatively higher incomes so their support for high taxes declines.
Marriage also provides an economic explanation for why men and women prefer different policies.
Single women who believe they may marry as well as married women who most fear divorce, look for protection against possible divorce: a more progressive tax system and other government transfers of wealth from rich to poor.
Lott considers that A good way to analyse the direct effect of women’s suffrage on the growth of government is to study how each of the 48 state governments expanded after women obtained the right to vote.
- Women’s suffrage was first granted in western states seeking women migrants: Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896).
- Women could vote in 29 states before women’s suffrage was achieved nationwide in 1920 with the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
The impact of granting of women’s suffrage was startling: state governments started expanding the first year after women voted and continued growing until real per capita spending more than doubled. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting.
There were 19 states that had not passed women’s suffrage before the approval of the 19th Amendment, nine approved the amendment, while the other 12 had suffrage imposed on them.
If some unknown third factor caused a desire for larger government and women’s suffrage, government should have only grown in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. After approving women’s suffrage, government grew at a similar pace in both groups of states.
As more women voted and eventually voted in similar numbers as men, the size of state and federal governments expanded as women became an increasingly important part of the electorate. It took up to 30 years for women’s voting participation rate to equal that of men.
Lott also found that women’s political views on average vary more than those of men:
- Young single women are about 50 per cent more likely to vote Democratic.
- For married women, this gap is only one-third as large.
- Married women with children become more conservative still.
- Women with children who are divorced are suddenly about 75 per cent more likely to vote for Democrats than single men.
Not surprisingly, political parties pitch their platforms to women because they are more likely to change their vote over identifiable issues that are within the scope for government to change or influence
Recent Comments