The Vital Difference Between the Sexes

First, download and read John Lott's excellent analysis of the affects of the 19th Amendment, then read the following carefully to understand what the Nineteenth Amendmend did to the US.

Jewish World Review
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/sam/silver.html
Oct. 31, 2000

IF YOU THINK the gender gap in electoral politics is a recent phenomenon, think again. It began in 1870 and has continued to grow. In recent presidential elections from 1980 to 1996, the difference in voting patterns between men and women has been 14-17 percentage points with the exception of 1992, which had only a 5% "gap." As we approach the 2000 presidential election, early opinion polls estimate a smaller than average gap, perhaps because George W. Bush understands the gender gap better than most.

Why is there a gender gap, and what implications does it have for our
society? The gender gap is deeper and more complex than the few "women's
issues" commonly discussed in the media. At its root, it is more basic than
gun safety, abortion, or tobacco. A recent study reported in the highly
respected and peer-reviewed Journal of Political Economy helps us understand
and quantify the gender gap. The paper, "Did Women's Suffrage Change the
Size and Scope of Government?" was written by John Lott, Jr. of Yale
University and Lawrence Kenny of the University of Florida. Yes, this is the
same John Lott that wrote More Guns, Less Crime.

The study concludes: "Giving women the right to vote significantly changed
American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary,
the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970's. Suffrage
coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and
revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of
the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female
suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state's U.S. House and
Senate delegations." Of course, all women do not prefer bigger government.
For example, if the gender gap is 16%, that would yield 58% liberal versus
42% conservative voting; thus 42% of women support conservative political
policies. Therefore, for this analysis we are only interested in the group
that votes differently at the margin.

Lott & Kenny hypothesize that a major reason women tend to vote for larger
and more liberal government is women's inherently higher aversion to risk.
They concluded, ".the gender gap in part arises from women's fears that they
are being left to raise their children on their own. If this result is true,
the continued breakdown of the family and the higher divorce rates imply
growing political conflicts between the sexes."

This fear is well known by the liberal/left wing of American politics. Susan
Estrich, former campaign manager for Michael Dukakis' Presidential campaign,
states her new book, Sex & Power: "Bush is ahead among married women. Gore
is strongest among those women who live alone and support their children.
The promise of a safety net counts for more with those who don't have a male
version of one."

One of the calamities of the 20th Century has been the successful attack on
the traditional two-parent family. The "abolition of the family" and ending
the dependence "of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the
parents" were specific goals of The Communist Manifesto! Marx and Engels
failed unequivocally in Russia, but have continued to succeed in America
through their current followers (conscious or subconscious) in academia, the
media, and politics.

Traditionally women had a vast support system for their children, from
husbands, to immediate family, to extended family, to church or synagogue,
to community based charitable organizations. The left has worked to
undermine these support mechanisms, replacing them with their "village,"
otherwise known as centralized government, which by necessity they must
control.

As a result, the left further increased women's perceived need for
centralized government to fill the voids they have created.

This study demonstrates that instead of the normal "transfer payment"
program where the government robs Peter to pay Paul, enough women, at the
margin, have voted for the government to rob Peter & Paul to pay Mary (after
taking out 50-67% for "bureaucratic overhead")! [See Appendix I at the end
of this article for details on the Lott & Kenny study)

Another recent study adds even more ammunition to the case that the left is
explicitly exploiting women. Have you ever wondered why the propaganda of
the left wing and their supporters in the media seems so effective in
shaping some women's voting preference? Well, it appears that women, on
average, know fewer facts about political issues. A new finding which is
even more disturbing is that while women in the past were aware when they
did not know the correct answer to a political question, they now think they
do know the correct answer when in fact they don't.

This is the conclusion of a study about the 2000 primary campaign by the
Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The study
was titled, "The Primary Campaign: What Did The Candidates Say, What Did The
Public Learn, And Did It Matter?" [See Appendix II at end of article for key
excerpts from that report.]

Similar surveys of factual political knowledge were carried out in 1996 and
2000 by the researchers. During both campaigns men were more likely to
answer questions about political issues correctly, but women and men reacted
differently when they did not know the correct answer. In 1996 if women did
not know the correct answers, they were more likely to say, "I don't know."
In 2000, women were still more likely to answer more questions incorrectly,
but were less likely to say, "I don't know." It is difficult to have a
meaningful discussion with someone who doesn't know that they don't know
what they think they know. Radical feminists have no problem with this
scenario, as they do not believe in objective reality, logic, or
rationality, which they label "phallocentric."

In presenting the study, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported that researcher
Kathleen Hall Jamieson explained one possible explanation is that women and
men discuss politics differently. "Men talk with one another at work about
politics," she said. "Women don't have that same socialization. It's a
function of how women talk about politics."

Women tended to get more answers wrong than men, Jamieson said, regardless
of age, race, income, education, marital status or party identification. One
theme common to either gender, she said, is that the more people relied on
local television news for information, the less informed they were. "Local
news watching makes you dumber," Jamieson said.

This implies that women are more susceptible to propaganda, misinformation,
the big lie, and political advertising/sound-bites - technical skills at
which the left and Democratic Party excel. It has always been perplexing
trying to understand why voters could believe some of the economic nonsense
and outright lies put forward by the left, but if all they are exposed to is
the television news sound bite with no rebuttal, it makes more sense. The
local and/or network news will usually play favorable sound bites from
Democrats, with no negative comments; while Republican sound bites are
almost always surrounded by some type of negative comment or suggestion. For
example, in the first Bush-Gore debate, most network news reports and
commentators stated that Al Gore "won the debate on points", but failed to
mentioned that at least six of his points were either lies, exaggerations,
or misleading statements. This was later discussed on news analysis shows,
talk radio, and newspapers. However, if a person's only source of news was
the local television news with its national news feed from the networks,
they would have the impression that Al Gore was the clear winner.

As a side note, this is another reason why government control of campaign
financing would be a disaster for the country. Not only will it give a huge
advantage to the incumbents of either party, but it will also make the use
of propaganda through television news broadcasts even more controlling, as
the party out of favor with the television media will not be able to take
their message directly to the people.

As a believer in freedom, individual rights, property rights, and limited
constitutional government, I think it is critical for our society to reduce
the excess insecurity being foisted onto women by the culture and politics
of the left. We must rebuild the traditional family values of our
Judeo-Christian culture and heritage. It is also critical that we strengthen
our non-coercive forms of aiding the weaker members of society, with
emphasis on the free market and faith-based programs as the most moral and
efficient alternatives to government control over our lives. If we do not
stop this onslaught against the traditional family, the gender gap will
continue to grow and unfortunately lead us further down the path to
socialism.

"Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?" by John Lott
& Lawrence Kenny.

In their study, "Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of
Government?" published in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of
Political Economy, John Lott & Lawrence Kenny examined "the growth of
government during this century as a result of giving women the right to
vote." They used cross-sectional time-series data for 1870-1940 to "examine
state government expenditures and revenues as well as voting by U.S. House
and Senate state delegations." Since analysis of Federal expenditures versus
women's suffrage was not statistically viable, they used state government as
a surrogate. There analysis confirmed that this was a valid surrogate. They
also analyzed the correlation between women voting and the political makeup
of Congress over this same period.

Since the states allowed women to vote at various times, this provided an
excellent method to look at the correlation over a variety of time periods,
thereby eliminating temporal effects. The first state to grant women voting
rights was Wyoming in 1869. Twenty-nine states gave women the right to vote
prior to passage in 1920 of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This granted the vote to women across the U.S. As part of their study, Lott
and Kenny analyzed voter turnout by women and found that initially older
women (45-64 years of age) participated at the greatest rate, and that it
took up to 30 years for women's voting participation rate to equal that of
men. As a result, they expected any effects for the granting of the vote to
increase over time.

The chart below provides a good overview of the method used and the strong
correlation they found. The dates when the vote was granted in each state is
standardized so that year 0 is the first year in which women were allowed to
vote in that state. The values to the left along the bottom axis show the
number of years before the vote was granted, and the values to the right
show the years after voting commenced in each state. The vertical axis
represents Real Per Capita State Government Spending & Revenue. The results
are dramatic!

sexdifference.jpg (26945 bytes)

This chart shows that state governments grew dramatically after women
received the right to vote. Within 11 years after suffrage was granted in
the various states, the size of the state governments more than doubled.
Lott & Kenny studied a variety of other variables to determine if this
relationship was causative or if something else was going on concurrently.
They concluded that "these differences are again quite statistically
significant, and they strongly rule out the possibility that higher
government spending simply arose because there was something that correlated
with giving women the right to vote and a desire for greater government
spending."

To determine if this same affect could be measured at the federal level,
they then analyzed the effects of women voting on the political direction of
the Federal Senate and Congress. They used measures of congressional and
Senate voting behavior from "legislative vote indexes" used in the field of
political science. These indexes differentiated "conservative" and "liberal"
legislators based on their voting records. For example, "conservative"
legislators between 1870-1940 "consistently opposed increased government
regulation, ranging from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the
minimum-wage law" as well as greater government spending. The method of
analysis was similar to the one for state government spending, and the
results were just as dramatic. "The two consistent results were the
following: allowing female suffrage resulted in a more liberal tilt in
congressional voting for both houses, and the extent of that shift was
mirrored by the increase in turnout due to female suffrage.. In the Senate,
suffrage changed the voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent
of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators."

So women voting led to larger government, but the next question is why do
women prefer big government at a higher rate than men. There have been a
variety of theories proposed over the years for the difference in voting
preference, which Lott & Kenny reviewed against their data. For example, in
an earlier paper they had hypothesized that the cause of the pro-government
voting record may be the ever-increasing employment of women by government
at all levels; however, the data did not support this theory, and they
rejected it.

The reason(s) for this difference is not obvious, but as it has existed over
an extended period, it appears it may be due to a fundamental difference
between men and women. Men and women were created equal, and they are equal
under the law, but radical feminists notwithstanding, they are definitely
different. For example, there is evidence in the financial and
socio-biological literature that women are more risk averse than men. That
is, they are generally less willing to take risks than men. It is this
difference that the authors believe may be at the root of the difference.

Since divorced women have often not fared well in obtaining alimony and
other support, and because women tend to have lower incomes, Lott & Kenny
conclude, "they benefit more from various government programs that
redistribute income to the poor, such as progressive taxation. Hence, single
women as well as women who anticipate that they may become single may prefer
a more progressive tax system and more wealth transfers to low-income people
as an alternate to a share of a husband's uncertain future income. Indeed,
we have found (in an earlier paper) that after women have to raise children
on their own, they are more likely to classify themselves as liberal, vote
for Democrats, and support policies such as progressive income taxation."

Therefore, that appears to be the answer. Some women have used the vote to
reduce their financial risks in life through use of government power. In
other words, we are robbing Peter & Paul to pay Mary.

Excerpts from: "The Primary Campaign: What Did The Candidates Say, What Did
The Public Learn, And Did It Matter?" published by The Annenberg Public
Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania (March 2000).

"Since 1980, women have voted either at the same or at a higher rate than
men. Why then do scholars consistently find that women answer fewer
questions correctly about political affairs than do men? This finding is
especially perplexing given that the status of women has changed
substantially in the last fifty years. Educational attainment is now
comparable between the sexes. There is greater female presence in the labor
force. And, the number of women seeking political office has risen.
Nevertheless, gender differences in political knowledge persist.

To ascertain if sex differences in political knowledge are present in the
2000 presidential primary campaign period, a political knowledge scale was
composed of thirteen knowledge items that asked adults about the issue
positions and backgrounds of Gore, Bradley, McCain and Bush. Using a
national sample of adults interviewed between December 14, 1999 and March
13, 2000, statistical analyses were performed to determine the variables
that predict political knowledge. Three outcomes were analyzed: (1) getting
an item correct, (2) answering the question but selecting an incorrect
answer, or (3) stating that one does not know an answer.

Prior research by Kenski and Jamieson (in press) of voters in the 1996
general election suggested that while there were sex differences in getting
items correct and stating that one did not know an answer, there were no
significant gender differences in selecting an incorrect answer. Men were
more likely to get answers correct, and women were more likely to say that
they did not know an answer to a question. In the 2000 presidential
campaign, women were also more likely to answer questions incorrectly. These
gender differences did not disappear when several sociodemographic
variables, such as age, race, education, income, marital status, party
identification, media exposure, etc., were controlled for.

The perplexing finding that women do not perform as well as men on political
knowledge still persists in the year 2000. Prior research on the 1996
general election indicated that while men got political knowledge items
correct more often that women and women said that they did not know the
answer more often than men, there were no gender differences in selecting
the incorrect answer. In the 2000 presidential primary, however, women are
more likely to select the incorrect answer."

Samuel Silver, a board member of Toward Tradition, writes from Greenville,
Mississippi.

Roughly two in 10 Americans (21%) say they have cried in the last two weeks as a direct result of the events of Sept. 11. Women are significantly more likely than men to say they have cried (29% to 13%). [Mar. 8-9, 2002]