[ ] Vignette of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
[ ] Vignette of the 2022 Korean presidential elections
[ ] Some observers see in these events signs of a continued and renewed backlash in the public against gender equality.
[ ] A prominent line of public opinion research, in fact, suggests that backlash may be a general phenomenon.
[ ] Example of attitudes toward abortion in the United States after Roe (1973), Webster (1989) [see @Wlezien1993], Casey (1992), and Dobbs (2022).
[ ] But public opinion scholars have also found that many 'policies create their own constituencies,' that is, after a policy is adopted, public opinion moves to support rather than oppose it.
[ ] So which is it that holds true: Does greater gender equality 'create its own constituency' or does it prompt backlash?
[ ] The public's responsiveness to rising gender equality is really only part of the relationship between opinion and policy: if and how parties and governments represent the public's attitudes is the other part. Do parties and governments respond to gender egalitarian public opinion by running more successful women candidates and adopting policies that advance gender equality?
[ ] There is a lot of theory and empirical research on gender politics to suggest that they do. Collective attitudes toward the appropriate roles of women and men in society---whether labeled culture, norms, ideology, or public opinion---constitute one of the primary explanations for the extent of women's inclusion in the traditionally masculine public sphere of the workforce, political power, and policy influence [see, e.g., @Paxton2021, 113-114].
[ ] Public opinion research is often at least somewhat more skeptical of representation. Some contend that it happens only very slowly, on the scale of decades [see, e.g., @Caughey2022]. Plenty of reasons why representation may not ever happen: sexist or even just skeptical party gatekeepers, institutional veto players, opposition among the wealthy.
[ ] Before we go on, we should mention that widely-held attitudes toward gender roles have often been labeled as aspects of ideology or norms or culture. To connect literatures, we will mainly refer to these attitudes, aggregated across the population of a country, as public opinion. Specifically, we will call egalitarian public opinion toward gender roles in politics and the workplace as macroegalitarianism.
Intro::Contributions
[ ] New data, based on thousands of surveys conducted in countries around the world, allows us to examine these questions together in comparative dynamic perspective. Drawing on recent advances in latent variable modeling of public opinion and a comprehensive collection of survey data, we update the Public Gender Egalitarianism dataset [@Woo2023] to address the need for comparable estimates of macroegalitarianism across more than one hundred countries over time.
[ ] Comparative: our new data allows us to examine experiences of countries around the world, not just the United States or Europe or any other single region. @Wilson2022 on imbalance in countries and regions studied. Plus, of course, the cases you choose influence the answers you get.
[ ] Dynamic: takes time seriously [@Stimson1995]. Given our inability to experimentally manipulate either policy or public opinion, how things unfold over time gives the best possible evidence of causation.
[ ] Considers party and policy representation alongside public responsiveness. Previous works tend to look at either one side of this loop or the other. The hazard of a one-sided approach is the risk of simultaneity bias due to endogeneity.
Intro::intro
Intro::Contributions