Gender and voting by nativity and ethnicity in New York City

This dissertation project examines the relationship between gender and voting behavior in New York City by nativity status. It is informed by the literatures on the gender gap in American politics, on immigrant political incorporation, and on racial/ethnic studies in urban politics. The main conclusion from the three empirical chapters is that differences in life experiences between foreign-born and native-born populations result in different styles of gendered electoral participation. The first empirical chapter employs logistic regression models for the foreign-born, native-born non-White, and native-born non-Hispanic White samples from the 1996-2002 CPS data. The results show that the gender gap in voting for the foreign-born sample can be attributed to immigrant women's marital status, labor-force participation, and the gender-structure of country of origin. When the same model (excluding the immigrant-specific variables) is employed for the two native-born samples, the explanatory power of marital status and labor-force participation on the effect of gender in voting appears to weaken for the native-born non-White sample and disappear for the native-born White sample. The second empirical chapter employs the Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM) to examine the relationship between context and gender in Hispanic turnout, using the New York City Board of Election's turnout data for the 2000 general election. The findings from this analysis suggest that (1) Latino men are more influenced than Latinas by the contextual factors in racially/ethnically concentrated areas, and (2) the difference in the Hispanic female-male turnout that is evident in racially/ethnically concentrated areas disappears in White-majority and White-plurality areas, a finding suggesting possible interaction between gender and class in turnout. Finally, the third empirical chapter, which focuses on explaining the gender gap in voting preferences by analyzing the voting for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, suggests that the 'political autonomy' thesis developed by Susan Carroll has a strong explanatory power in analyzing why women's and men's vote differ for the city's native-born voters, but is of limited or no use in the case of immigrant voters.