I was just rereading “The American Voter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Voter and noted with interest their theoretical justifications for controlling for sex in voting analyses (see ch.17). These essentially boil down ot:
# The lingering effect of the belief that women should not play a political role
# The fact that this effect is stronger at lower levels of education (which is amplified by the fact that women are less educated than men).
# The fact that women have lower levels of political efficacy than men
# The fact that women have lower levels of political sophistication than men
For those unfamiliar with _The American Voter_, it is important to note that the book was written 50 years ago. So if we are willing to conclude that the “lingering effect” of the belief that women should not play a political role is no longer “lingering today”:http://www.facebook.com/sarahpalin, then what’s the _theoretical_ justification for continuing to include sex in voting analyses? Even if, as the American Voter authors suggested, sex is a proxy for feelings of political efficacy and/or sophistication – and that’s obviously a big if these days – wouldn’t we be better off just including direct measures of efficacy and sophistication in our analyses? Similar logic should apply to using sex as a proxy for policy preferences: why not just include the policy preferences themselves in the models?
The one justification that seems clear to me is when sex conforms directly to an “identity party”. So similarly to the fact that in a multi-party system featuring an agrarian party (or minority party), we want to control for being a farmer (or ethnicity), we should probably control for sex in elections featuring women’s parties. But beyond that, I pose the question again: what’s the theoretical justification for including sex in voting models?
