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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.
Admittedly, the stated scenario of:
seems to apply about as well to a country divided politically along age lines as along gender lines. And if the US continues to have an aging population with declining fertility, the %s might not be that far off, either.
Interestingly partisan stratification by age is also (according to Pew's data) a pretty recent phenomenon. According to their partisanship of generational cohorts it basically didn't matter what age range you were in during the 90's, the distribution of Democrats and Republicans was very close. By 2009 the 20-29 cohort was significantly more Democrat but the others were still pretty even. Then by 2023 the 24-33 cohort was even more Democrat and all the 54+ demographics were significantly more Republican (proportional with age).
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I mean if that's the case then the age thing applies as much as the gender thing as far as being a proxy for war goes. A 63+ year-old American man is not going to be any more useful in a war than the average woman.
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