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Notes -
I recently saw a provocative bit of 4chan greentext concerning politics and gender. I'll reproduce it here as follow -
As far as analysis goes, this is obviously not especially sophisticated or historically grounded. However, it does pose an interesting problem, which is perhaps better framed in more general terms, since it applies as much to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe as it does men and women.
Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?
It seems to me that it's not trivial that it's unsustainable. In particular, a sustainable model might involve the following: (i) the ongoing costs to Group A of Exemplavania being run by Group B are low. (ii) the one-off costs of Group A enacting a violent revolution to enfranchise their own power are high. (iii) all members of the polity do some form of temporal discounting. In this case, members of Group A might rationally conclude that it's not worth the hassle of an uprising.
Nonetheless, I do worry a bit that political polarisation along gender lines is unsustainable. Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1. Insofar as women's political tendencies remained broadly aligned with a large proportion of men (or powerful enough men), as they have done more or less until now, this arrangement seems pretty stable. However, if we see continued political polarisation along gender lines, as we've seen in South Korea for example, and this leads to political outcomes that are strongly disfavoured by a large majority of men, then at some point the decision to enfranchise women may be in jeopardy.
Curious what others think!
I think the degree of gender polarization in the United States is quite overstated. According to Pew, from April 2024, there's a 5-8 percentage point gap between men and women in terms of party identification (men are 46D-52R compared to women's 51D-44R). Compare this to the 20 point gap in your example. The Pew article also provides a historical graph of this identification going back to 1994. It's hard to look at the graph and see a consistent trend of gender polarization. Instead it seems to me the electorate as a whole tends to move as one, men and women becoming more Democrat or more Republican in tandem. There are also periods where voters have been even more polarized by gender than they are today. That 5-8 point gap today was 10 points in 1994, mostly due to men being even more Republican then.
ETA:
Lest people think this is a young-person phenomenon the data Pew has shows precisely the opposite. Men and women under 50 are united in being majority Democrats, while men and women over 50 are the ones polarized by gender.
This is basically the thread ended right? The imagined scenario doesn't even exist as the gender politics gap hasn't changed and has deceased if anything, age is apparently where the big gap is actually.
Wrong. The numbers are only that even because of old people. 80 percent of Gen Z women are liberal and 70 percent of Gen-Z men are conservative.
Do you have a citation for that? According to Gallup men in the 18-29 age range as of 2023 (not quite entirely GenZ) break down their identification as 29/44/25 between Conservative/Moderate/Liberal. This is compared to women's 21/37/40 split of the same. A PRRI report purporting to be specifically of GenZ also has GenZ men as quite liberal (38% identify as liberal compared to 31% who identify as conservative) though not as liberal as GenZ women (47% liberal to 24% conservative).
I will point out that self-identification is not an amazing barometer of political division, because "what counts as moderate" is highly subjective.
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A bunch of people confuse "The vast majority of young conservatives are male" with "the vast majority of young men are conservatives."
It’s also probably true that a significant majority of loud young conservatives are men, and loud young liberals are women, but groups analogous to the “silent majority” are silent for a reason.
I am reminded for example of a recent poll on X/Twitter about presidential preference Elon posted which Trump won handily. This tells you quite a lot about Twitter users that follow and engage with Elon’s posts and not much about the United States’ actual voting population, which people in the comments crowing about “sample size” seem to have completely missed.
As I've said before, a lot of of the overreaction about young men turning right is from two sources -
1.) Right-leaning people hoping that they're not doomed in the long run 2.) Left-leaning people shocked there are still young right-wing people.
The other thing is 14-17 year old boys are pretty terrible for somewhat sympathetic reasons (ie. they're horny with no real outlet), and the vast majority of them that get girlfriends (which most still do) calm down the first time their girlfriend makes fun of them.
Also, I think a lot of 'redpill' content is being consumed by non-American male audiences, which also shift things.
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Exactly, polling is hard. Random sampling is hard.
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