Gender Differences in Citizen-Level Democratic Citizenship: A Multilevel Analysis

Scholars seeking to understand the gender basis of citizen incorporation into democratic politics have proceeded along two tracks. One, focusing on macro- and institutional phenomena, emphasizes the impact of economic development, modernization, culture, and collective action in determining the invocation of women's rights or the degree to which women participate in politics at the mass or elite level. The other, focusing on individual-level behavior and orientations, emphasizes the impact of demographic and psychological characteristics on gender differences. This article integrates the two tracks by investigating the gender basis of some key aspects of democratic citizenship through an analysis of the impact of gender on political knowledge, engagement, and satisfaction with democracy using cross-national analysis that first asks what difference gender makes in each country at the individual level, and then, seeks to account for the cross-national variation in the impact of gender.

Unpublished Manuscript

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, where it was awarded the Sophonisba P. Breckinridge Award for best paper on women and politics, and at the 2002 Conference on Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems.