Political Attitudes and Partisanship Among Australian Couples:

Abstract

Over the past two decades, political analysts have devoted considerable attention to gender differences in political behavior and attitudes. Despite this increase in research activity, however, the contribution of married women in assessing these differences is rarely investigated. In an effort to remedy this situation, this paper focuses not only on the political attitudes of married couples, but also on the degree to which the social background characteristics of married women determine both their own political attitudes and the political attitudes of their husbands. The results suggest that, for both husbands and wives, a person's own characteristics are generally just as important as the social characteristics of their spouse in predicting their own political attitudes, and that both husbands' and wives' characteristics also exert an independent influence on the political attitudes of their spouses.