New PhD on gender and politics
The gender gap in voting can mainly be explained by income and differences in "feminist consciousness", according to Johannes Bergh. He has studied the importance of gender and gender relations in the political arena. In his dissertation, he compares change and development in modern democracies like Norway, the USA and The Netherlands.
Friday February 28, he presented his doctoral thesis "Gender Attitudes, New Politics and Modernization. Four Studies of Continuity and Change in Modern Democracies."
The evalutaion committee consisted of Professor Lise Togeby, Aarhus University, professor Anders Todal Jenssen, NTNU,and professor Oddbjørn Knutsen, from the Unversity of Oslo. The committee praised the candidates work in general, and his methodical competence in particular. Bergh was also commended for his critical focus on established truths.
Bergh's doctoral thesis is composed of four articles that test empirically problematic or unsetteled in the established literature:
Explaining the Gender Gap
A Cross-National Analysis of Gender Differences in Voting Published in Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 17:235–261, 2007.
Most modern democratic societies have seen a gender gap in voting in the last 10-20 years, with women in the majority on the political left, and men on the right. Despite the cross-national nature of this phenomenon and the extensive amount of research on the gender gap, scholars have not succeeded in finding cross-national explanations for it. Through a detailed specification of the causal effects at work, I outline a model that explains the gender gap in voting in different countries. I test the model, by performing path analysis on data from the United States, the Netherlands, and Norway. The analysis reveals a strong effect of "feminist consciousness" on the gender gap in the US and in Norway.
Gender Attitudes and Modernization Processes
Published in International Journal of Public Opinion Research,19 (1):5–23, 2007.
This article aims to explain why attitudes toward gender equality and gender relations in society vary between individuals and countries. The hypotheses that are tested stem from two partly conflicting theories of modernization. Wilensky (2002) advocates a ‘structural’ explanation for variation in gender attitudes, while Inglehart (1990, 1997) suggests a ‘values’ explanation. The author conducts a three-part analysis: an individual, a national, and a multilevel analysis. The structural explanation is better able to account for individual level gender attitudes. Values do, to some extent, serve as the mechanism that produces national level variation. Inglehart (1990, 1997) is also right in suggesting that the effect of values on gender attitudes increases with increasing development.
Public Opinion and Representation of Women in National Legislatures: An Analysis of Cause and Effect
Accepted for publishing in The Journal of Legislative Studies.
Read more about Johannes Bergh
Read more about gender and society research at ISF