ABSTRACT
Research on public opinion is booming, and this holds particularly for investigations that center on gender or on race. For those of us trying to keep up, it is downright alarming. Every time we turn around, there are more papers to read, more books to review, more conferences to attend, and more findings to assimilate. Our purpose here is to bring some order and coherence to this lively and rapidly expanding field of scholarship. We begin by enumerating important features that gender and race share in common and then point out one major difference. This one difference, which has to do with how gender and race are organized in society, has far-reaching ramifications for the distinct roles that gender and race play in public opinion. Or so we try to show here, as we take up a series of consequential political puzzles: the changing relationship between gender and race and the American party system; gender gaps and racial divides in public opinion on policy; gender and race as sources of group solidarity; gender and race as objects of attitude; and, finally, the activation of gender and race in politics. In the conclusion, we speculate, cautiously, on the future.1
