Cross-National Gender Gaps in Political Knowledge

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916642867
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Author: Jessica Fortin-Rittberger
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

2016, Vol. 69(3) 391 –402

© 2016 University of Utah

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1065912916642867

prq.sagepub.com

Article

Introduction

Political knowledge is a central indicator of “cognitive

engagement” underpinning attitude formation and con-

nectedness to political processes (Zaller 1992). In short,

political knowledge is a crucial resource for citizens to

participate effectively in politics (Basinger and Lavine

2005; Gelman and King 1993; Lau and Redlawsk 2006;

Sniderman, Glaser, and Griffin 1991). Cognitive engage-

ment is considered to be essential for democratic citizen-

ship, yet political knowledge is unequally distributed: the

overwhelming majority of studies on the topic finds a siz-

able and consistent gap between men and women on bat-

teries of items measuring political knowledge (Burns,

Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Delli Carpini and Keeter

1996, 2000; Dow 2009; Fraile 2014; Frazer and

Macdonald 2003; Garand, Guynan, and Fournet 2005;

Kenski and Jamieson 2000; Lizotte and Sidman 2009;

Mondak and Anderson 2004; Sanbonmatsu 2003; Verba,

Burns, and Schlozman 1997; Wolak and McDevitt 2011).

Although the existence of gender-based differences in

political knowledge is an established finding, most conclu-

sions about their causes were reached from studies focus-

ing on only a single or a handful of countries and have

mainly highlighted individual-level predictors.1 To date,

no comparative study has sought to combine the different

individual and contextual—societal, institutional, and

instrument-related—variables that significantly affect the

difference in political knowledge between men and women

across several countries. This article seeks to address this

lacuna by investigating whether contextual cross-national

differences hold a key to explain these gender gaps.

Drawing on a pooled data set containing three modules of

the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) data

project, this analysis uses the broadest country coverage

and most comprehensive approach to measurement to date.

This article sets out to make two contributions: first,

using three different scoring systems to deal with factual

knowledge questions—measuring positive knowledge,

expressive answers, and levels of accuracy—the analyses

provide evidence of pervasive gender gaps in political

knowledge that hold for more than forty countries irre-

spective of the approach to measurement employed. The

second contribution stems from the differentiated

approach to measurement. The magnitude of gender gaps

is contingent on scoring systems used by researchers:

642867PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916642867Political Research QuarterlyFortin-Rittberger

research-article2016

1University of Salzburg, Austria

Corresponding Author:

Jessica Fortin-Rittberger, Department of Political Science, University

of Salzburg, Rudolfskai 42, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.

Email: j.fortin-rittberger@sbg.ac.at

Cross-National Gender Gaps in

Political Knowledge: How Much

Is Due to Context?

Jessica Fortin-Rittberger1

Abstract

Although the majority of studies on political knowledge document lingering gender-based differences in advanced

industrial democracies, most contributors have drawn such conclusions from a single or a handful of countries,

using limited batteries of political information items. Exploiting a pooled data set of the Comparative Study of

Electoral Systems encompassing 106 post-election surveys in forty-seven countries between 1996 and 2011, this

article demonstrates that survey instrument–related factors, such as question format and content, as well as the

overall difficulty of questions, are more consequential in shaping the size of gender gaps in political knowledge than

institutional factors, such as electoral rules or opportunity structures. The research design of this article draws from

almost three hundred different items measuring factual political knowledge using the broadest country coverage and

most comprehensive approach to measurement to date.

Keywords

political knowledge, gender, electoral institutions, women and politics, survey research