Understanding the Changing Dynamics of the
Gender Gap in American Presidential Elections,
1952-2004
Introduction
The gender gap is an important and enduring phenomenon in American politics.
According to an enormous volume of both academic and journalistic sources, the differences in
the voting choices of women and men based on their partisanship and issue priorities can explain
why certain candidates win and others lose. This well-known and perhaps overly used phrase
has been credited as well as blamed for the outcome of several elections throughout the 1980s,
1990s and 2000s. Along the way many have attempted to explicate the forces that cause or at
least contribute to this difference between the male and female vote, and several common
findings have been suggested throughout the literature. However, few have argued that the
simple gender gap is far more complex than what we are led to believe and that there are actually
several “gaps” among the various types of women and men in society. To simply expect that
women vote differently than men due to their gender is ignoring the various contributing factors
that influence how people vote.
The purpose of this study is to disaggregate the simplified gender gap and to investigate
what the different factors are that generate voting choices among women in society. We
investigate this by examining trends in the gender gap from 1948-2004 based upon data
availability. Although it is obvious that a gap between the sexes does exist, which groups of
women contribute to this gap and which groups appear to vote similarly to the men in society?
This paper challenges the existence of a simple gender gap and suggests that a “cohort” gender
gap is more accurate at explaining the disparity between voting decisions of certain groups of
1
Convention