John F. Zipp

Gender Differences in Voting for Female Candidates: Evidence from the 1982 Election

This paper analyzes voting in five 1982 elections in which women ran as major party candidates for high-level offices: Governor in Vermont and Iowa; and U.S. Senator in Missouri, New York, and New Jersey. Results indicate that the sex of the candidate generally has little impact on voting and that solid women candidates can attract cross-over votes, while weaker ones can lose them. The implications of these results are discussed in the concluding section. John F. Zipp is an Assistant Professor and Eric Plutzer is a Ph.D. candidate, both in the Department of Sociology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, which supported, in part, this research. Data used come from surveys done by CBS, ABC and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, KMOX television and radio stations in St. Louis. The authors wish to thank Betsy Bruce, Jack Flach, Dan Mittleman, Vince Narramore, Vicky Witte, Jan Yoder, and the Thursday on Friday Discussion Group for their help. The authors, each of whom contributed equally to this paper, are solely responsible for the analysis and conclusions. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 49:179-197 ?D by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 0033-362X/85/0049-179/

ES202: The Data Base for Local Employment Analysis

2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 05:42:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 180 JOHN F. ZIPP AND ERIC PLUTZER policies affect women (e.g., Diamond, 1983; Gelb and Palley, 1982), (2) gender differences in political participation and attitudes (e.g., Baxter and Lansing, 1983; Goertzel, 1983), and (3) womens experience in public affairs, including barriers to the recruitment to and the holding of offices by political elites (e.g., Diamond, 1977; Kirkpatrick, 1974; Mandel, 1982). In examining how gender differences in voting affect the electibility of female candidates we are, in a loose sense, combining the emphases of the last two of these areas. We shall discuss each in turn.

Wives, Husbands, and Hidden Power in Marriage:

This article analyzes the costs and benefits of using state-level unemployment compensation (UC) records, commonly known as ES202 data, for analyzing local economic change. Although the unedited UC records are helpful for the most general level for statewide analysis, these records must be edited considerably for more detailed questions and/or any substate analyses. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukees Urban Research Center detail the problems and issues they confronted in using Wisconsins ES202 data to address these latter concerns. Included is a description of the type of data available from ES202 reports and a discussion of the many obstacles that are likely to confront all researchers attempting to transform raw ES202 data into a more useful form. The authors conclude that properly used, ES202 data provide a wide range of valuable information that can be used to inform local economic development policy

She Said, He Said, They Said: The Impact of Spousal Presence in Survey Research

A recurrent theme in scholarship on gender and the family is the asymmetry between husbands and wives on decision making, the division of household labor, child care, and so forth. In this article, the authors tested to see if this asymmetry can be explained, in part, by taking into account the invisible power of men. Using data from the third wave of the British Household Panel Survey, the authors tested this by assessing whether agreement between husbands and wives on stereotypical men’s and stereotypical women’s issues increased when one of the spouses heard the other’s responses before answering himself or herself. The authors’ key findings are that (a) wives were much more likely than husbands to agree with their spouses’ known answers and (b) that this remains true even in conditions where wives earn more money or are more interested in politics than their husbands.

Learning by Exams: The Impact of Two-Stage Cooperative Tests

Since concerns about privacy are paramount for most survey organizations, it is standard practice to instruct interviewers to question respondents alone, especially on sensitive attitudes and behaviors. Despite these guidelines, third parties-specially spouses and children-frequently are present in interviews. Although most research has found little impact of third parties, we contend that conceptual and methodological weaknesses may be masking these effects. Using interviews from both husbands and wives in the British Household Panel Study, we have several key findings. First, spousal presence during an interview leads to greater agreement between husbands and wives on a variety of attitudinal and behavioral items: class identification, party affiliation, economic liberalism, postmaterialism, and the division of household labor. Second, the presence of a spouse does not make one more likely to report a particular ideological (e.g., the government should guarantee jobs to everyone who needs them) or socially desirable position (e.g., women do less ironing). Finally, the source of this increased agreement is different for men and women

Government Employment and Black-White Earnings Inequality, 1980-1990

Decades of research have documented the positive impacts of cooperative learning on student success: increased learning, retention through graduation, improved critical thinking, and intrinsic motivation. One cooperative teaching technique, however, has received relatively little attention. In the two-stage cooperative, group, or “pyramid” exam students first take an exam individually—as in traditional testing—and then take the same exam together with their learning group, with the exam grade being a weighted combination of their individual and group scores. This approach uses the exam itself not only for evaluation, but also as a learning tool. Although some researchers have studied group exams, they have not isolated the impact of group tests from individual achievement—an important omission. Using data from a mass lecture introductory sociology course, I found that holding individual achievement constant the group exam process significantly increased learning both for students who knew the material initially and for those who did not. This suggests that cooperative exams not only enhance learning but also allow for the process and form of testing to become more closely linked to the process and form of teaching and learning.

THE POWER OF NUMBERS IN INFLUENCING HIRING DECISIONS

Through both its direct employment and its policies, the public sector historically has provided an important avenue for the upward mobility of blacks. However, the conservative Reagan-Bush agenda of the 1980s greatly redefined the role of government in promoting racial equality, and this paper tests to see if the advantages that blacks have obtained from government employment changed across the decade. Utilizing the 1980 and 1990 CPS microdata, I find that racial inequality increased in the federal government and that, concomitantly, the benefits for blacks working for the federal government decreased between 1980 and 1990. I conclude with the implications of these results for both research and policy.

Social class and social liberalism

This article explores the influence that the proportion of women in a department has on hiring decisions in the field of psychology. A sample of advertisers from the APA Monitor was asked to identify the gender of the candidate hired. Hiring patterns were the same for men and women hirers in nonacademic organizations, as each favored male candidates. In academic hiring, women candidates were favored in departments with moderate female representation. This finding counters claims that women are hired by departments with few women in response to affirmative action. Rather, the presence of moderate numbers of women influences hiring decisions that promote womens opportunities.

The Quality of Jobs in Small Business

The relationship between social class and politics has been a central concern of political sociologists over the years. Recently various scholars have contended that the last twenty years have witnessed the emergence of noneconomic or social issues (e.g., equal rights, personal freedom) and of a “middle class” liberalism, especially on these social issues. In fact, it was claimed that this “privileged radicalism” has led to an inversion of the traditional relationship between class and political ideology, as now it is the middle class which is more supportive than the working class of liberal positions on the important social issues of the day. In this paper we subject these claims to a rigorous empirical test using 1973–1982 NORC data. Our findings indicate that there is little support forclass differences in social liberalism, and that most of the apparent differences are due to education. Furthermore, affluence does not have a consistent effect on social liberalism. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analyses for the nature of class differences in American society.

Economic Restructuring and Political Response.

Since David Birchs work on the role of small business in job creation, a considerable amount of scholarly and practical attention has focused on small businesses. State and local governments have formulated policies to foster small business birth and growth, while scholars have tried to measure more accurately the contributions of small business to economic development. In furthering the latter, this article assesses the quality of jobs in small, medium and large establishments. In general, small businesses provide jobs with lower wages, benefits and stability, but with more creativity, interesting work, autonomy, and overall job satisfaction. The implications of this for economic development are discussed in the concluding section.