Political Conflict at Home: A Gender and Couple Perspective on Political Orientations and Party Preferences
Daniela Grunow, Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main
Families are important sites at which individuals exchange and transmit values and practices associated with social cohesion through day-to-day interaction. Family and gender relations, however, have been particularly affected by social change in recent decades while new social and cultural conflicts have surfaced and appear to divide contemporary societies, for example along issues of cultural openness and social solidarity. It is at present unclear how these social and cultural conflicts relate to political changes that have affected family lives. For example, across Europe, various political work-care models currently exist but we know little about how these changes have altered personal political preferences and their transmission within couples and households. Related to this, both egalitarian and essentialist gender ideologies and family ideals have spread unevenly across genders and countries, with unclear consequences for social conflict.
In this talk I will sketch a broader research agenda addressing these issues and then zoom into an empirical paper that assesses mechanisms of couples’ political homogamy in Germany.
About the speaker:
Daniela Grunow is a Full Professor of Sociology specializing in quantitative Analyses of social change with a focus on gender, norms, ideologies and work, at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. Daniela Grunow is the director of the Institute for Empirical-Analytical Research (InFER) at Goethe University and Spokesperson of the research group “Reconfiguration and Internalization of Social Structure” (RISS, FOR5173), funded by the German Research Foundation. She is also co-speaker of the Frankfurt division of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC), a network of eleven university and research institutes, investigating social cohesion, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).