Econstudentlog

“Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys” (P.J.O’Rourke)

Feminization and the public sector?

Just found this graph on swivel:

blog5.png

The idea that political preferences and gender are not necessarily independent variables strikes me as more and more plausible. If you consider “public sector employment” a loose indicator for leftish-ness – which I find unproblematic – and notice that for all countries, the ratio is larger than one, these considerations would support the conclusion that gender and political opinion are not independent.

As to just why and how the two covariate I still need to find a reasonable explanation…

Btw. to those who are convinced gender and politics are independent: Why do you think so?

I still fail to see why this hypothesis to many people seems so much more convincing than the alternative. Why shouldn’t gender have an impact on political opinion, given that it is such an important identity component?

juli 3, 2007 - Skrevet af US | random stuff, swivel | | 2 Kommentarer

2 Kommentarer »

  1. I dare say that the gender effect on political opion (p.o.) aswell as p.o. formatting (how we respond to new information) is well established from countless emperical studies (gender is the sine qua non background variable in every political survey).
    That said i think the swivel data shouldn’t be over interpreted: I would think that the observed differences in gender ratio across countries have more to do with the compound of services being provided by the public sector in those countries. Further data and analysis needed etc. etc. etc. :-)

    Comment af Andreas | juli 3, 2007 | Svar

  2. Thank you for that comment Andreas.

    As a student of economics, I have not had anything to do with political surveys, so of course your “gender is _the_ sine quo non background variable” in this area is news to me.

    Agree with you on the “further data and analysis part”. Of course, I did not comment on the variation of the data at all in my post (I merely noticed the level) precisely because I imagine that this variation is rather difficult to say anything meaningful about. Like you, I’m quite sure the differences have a lot to do with just which services are provided by the government. But this doesn’t really get us any closer to an answer. The compound of public services should not be treated as exogenous.

    One other related hypothesis one might consider is this: The female/male ratio wrt. public sector employment is increasing in government size. I don’t know if it is true, but I certainly have not been convinced otherwise.

    Comment af US | juli 3, 2007 | Svar


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