Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior

Monika McDermott’s book adds a new dimension to a growing literature that chronicles the pervasive ways in which masculinity and femininity are evident in U.S. politics. This book extends current findings that messages about gender are commonplace in party strategies, documenting how voters’ own sense of masculinity and femininity provide a lens through which they make meaning of these messages. To do so, McDermott creates a strong theoretical argument grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship that draws upon decades of psychology research demonstrating masculinity and femininity to be individual forces that powerfully shape human attitudes and behaviors in non-political domains. Her applications of these theories and findings to the political domain deliver powerful contributions to scholarship in the fields of political behavior, political psychology, and gender politics.