The background for the 2020 US elections included a global pandemic that had already killed well over 200,000 Americans, a president expressing at best tepid support for democratic institutions, and months-long Black Lives Matter protests against structural racism. Nevertheless, one thing about the election felt familiar to anyone who follows American politics—the ubiquitous coverage of gender gaps. These systemic differences in women and men’s evaluation of candidates, policies, or political party capture our attention because they remain a consistent presence in American politics. As important, they also influence the outcomes of American elections. Gender gaps in policy preference create gender gaps in partisan identification and vote choice. Yet despite their important consequences, the academic literature on gender gaps in policy preferences leaves many questions about their causes unanswered. Mary-Kate Lizotte’s book, Gender Differences in Public Opinion, addresses these questions, exploring the role that values play in the creation of the gender gaps in policy preferences.

Lizotte offers us a new explanation for the gender gaps in political preferences: gender differences in prosocial values. Women possess greater concern than men with the well-being of other people. As a result, she argues, women express lower levels of support for the use of force by the government and higher levels of support for regulations and government spending to protect the environment, as well as for policies and government spending on social welfare programs. Gender gaps in prosocial values also seem to explain large portions of gender gaps in support for gender roles, affirmative action, racial resentment, and gay rights. Her mediation analysis indicates that two particular prosocial value types, universalism and benevolence, explain substantial portions of the gender gaps that exist on attitudes about the use of force, the environment, equal rights, and social welfare issues.

Gender Differences in Public Opinion makes a meaningful contribution to the literature on gender gaps in policy preferences. Much of this literature involves theories explaining gender gaps that fail to transcend policy domains. For example, explanations of gender differences in aggression relate to gender gaps in foreign policy preferences, but this theory does not readily explain the emergence of gender gaps on economic or social issues. In focusing on gender differences in values that underlie issue preferences, Lizotte offers a theoretical framework for the development of gender gaps that transcends the piecemeal approach to explaining them that characterizes much of the scholarly literature on this topic.

At the same time, Lizotte compares the impact of prosocial value types on the development of gender gaps with that of other prominent explanations, including feminist consciousness, economic circumstances, and social role theory. Consistently, her analysis suggests that prosocial values play a greater role in the development of gender gaps than other potential causes. Her inclusion of these competing explanations provides the reader with a sense of the impact of prosocial values relative to other possible causes of the phenomenon, albeit often with less-than-ideal measures of those other possible causes. Her careful analysis of how her theory performs relative to others represents a clear attempt to move the literature forward, not just by offering another competing explanation for the development of gender gaps but also by allowing us to evaluate and potentially discard other theories. Yet as a reader, I found myself questioning whether Lizotte missed opportunities to integrate existing theories into her framework and to resolve some of the seemingly disparate findings in the gender gaps literature.

For example, Lizotte could have integrated feminist consciousness and social role theory into her values framework. Both of these explanations also involve values—in particular, values that are, to a large extent, prosocial. A feminist consciousness, as defined by Pamela Conover in “Feminists and the Gender Gap” (Journal of Politics, 50 [4], 1988), means that an individual possesses an awareness of inequalities, demonstrates a willingness to use government to address those inequalities, and identifies with others who consider themselves feminists. Crossover clearly exists between Conover’s definition and the prosocial values Lizotte uses in her analysis. In a similar way, social role theory involves women learning and internalizing the prosocial values associated with caretaking and concern for others. In the final chapter (p. 184), the author even notes that the source of value differences may very well lie in the process of gender role socialization. Why then present feminist consciousness and gender role as separate from a prosocial values framework? Could the author make a strong argument here that her theoretical framework subsumes, at least partially, both of these explanations? Even more importantly, could that argument not also indicate that Lizotte’s values framework identifies the specific mechanism (prosocial values) that explains the effects those studying feminist consciousness and socialization have found on the development of gender gaps in political preferences?

Extending her analysis of the prosocial values framework to moral issues could also make her argument even more compelling. These issues, such as drug legalization, school prayer, or abortion, would provide a useful test of Lizotte’s findings. Moral issues represent a rare area where women tend to possess more conservative attitudes than men. Are prosocial values as powerful a force in shaping gender gaps in this area as in others? The values framework presented in this book could easily be adapted to analysis of gender gaps on morality. It is certainly possible that concern for others (the unborn, those addicted to drugs) may underlie women’s more conservative responses on these moral issues. The American National Election Studies that Lizotte uses for her analyses include a number of questions on these issues and would provide further evidence for her contention that value differences between men and women create gender gaps in public policy.

The justification for limiting her analysis to prosocial values is another area that I wish the author would have developed further. She notes that 10 value types exist in the literature from which she draws. Why limit her analysis to only prosocial value types? Are these the only value types where scholars find gender gaps? Is this merely a reflection of the measures available to the author in datasets with the necessary political questions? Are there theoretical reasons—for example, those related to the development of a feminist consciousness or social role theory discussed earlier—to expect prosocial values to play a role but not other value types? I would have liked to see Lizotte develop this aspect of her argument, providing the reader with a stronger justification for herr focus on prosocial values.

Lizotte’s Gender Differences in Public Opinion promises to advance our understanding of the causes of gender gaps, providing a more comprehensive theoretical foundation than existing and compelling data analyses that indicate strong support for her prosocial values theory. My critiques largely center on ways in which she could have made her theory more expansive and the supporting data even more compelling. Nonetheless, this book makes a very clear theoretical and empirical contribution to an area of research that, despite its electoral importance, receives relatively little scholarly attention.