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50 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/amjorpolisci50 and id is 1 raw text is: The Political Economy of Gender: Explaining Cross-National Variation in the Gender Division of Labor and the Gender Voting Gap Torben Iversen Harvard University Frances Rosenbluth Yale University Mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy. In a world with high divorce rates, we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct. Wefind that labor market opportunities for women, which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state, affect women's bargainingpower within thefamily and as a result, can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences. ome of the most notable variance in income, labor market status, and the division of labor is gender based. On average, women participate less in the labor market than men, whereas they assume the lion's share of unpaid work in the household. Women also tend to be less well paid than men when they do work, and they occupyjobs with lower job security, fewer prospects of ad- vancement, and less responsibility. Often, these inequal- ities spill over into a gender gap in political preferences and voting behavior. Following Becker's (1964, 1971, 1981, 1985) semi- nal work on the family, economists have traditionally ex- plained the gender division of labor as the outcome of a coordination game where a more or less complete division of labor is the efficient solution due to increasing returns to human capital. Although the biological advantages of women specializing in household skills are slim in a mod- ern economy, such specialization may be reinforced by childhood socialization in which parents rationally seek to impart values on their offspring that will maximize their chances of success later in life. Since gender roles are assigned before true preferences are observable, the coordination game is solved by using (inherently small) gender differences as the cue. But while the efficiency model captures some key as- pects of the family as an institution, it is incapable of accounting for the stark differences in female labor force participation across economies at comparable levels of development, and it fails to explain why there is so much variance in the distribution of housework between the sexes after controlling for hours spent in paid work and earnings. Building on recent economic bargaining mod- els of the family (Braunstein and Folbre 2001; Folbre 1994; Lundberg and Pollak 1996,2001; Pollak 1999,2003), we argue that this division of labor puzzle can only be understood by treating marriage as an incomplete con- tract that is potentially subject to termination. When this is the case, both men and women have an incentive to cultivate their outside options by entering into paid work, and the distribution of unpaid work is determined Torben Iversen is professor of government, Harvard University, Adolphus Busch Hall, 27 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138 (iversen@fas.harvard.edu). Frances Rosenbluth is professor of political science, Yale University, 124 Prospect St # 304, New Haven, CT 06520-8301 (rosenbluth@yale.edu). We gratefully acknowledge insightful comments from Jim Alt, Kathy Bawn, Chuck Cameron, Lewis Kornhauser, Margarita Estevez-Abe, John Ferejohn, Geoffrey Garrett, Jonas Pontusson, Leonard Schoppa, David Soskice, Michael Thies, Justin Wolfers, and participants at the 102nd convention of the American Political Science Association, the NYU Law School Colloquium on Law and Economics, the Princeton WoodrowWilson School and Politics Department, the Association for European Studies, and anonymous reviewers forAJPS. Erica Franklin, Nirmala Ravishankar, and Jun Saito provided able research assistance. Financial support from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy made our research possible. American Journal ofPolitical Science, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 2006, Pp. 1-19 ©2006, Midwest Political Science Association ISSN 0092-5853 1