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Abstract
According to conventional wisdom, the traditional gender gap in voting has disappeared or even reversed in most established democracies. Drawing on the existing literature on differences between the sexes in political engagement and on pioneering voter turnout theories, this article questions the conventional assumption and hypothesises that women still participate at a lower rate in less important elections. It systematically tests this hypothesis by exploring the impact of gender on voter turnout in different electoral arenas. The empirical analyses of two cross-national datasets (Making Electoral Democracy Work and the European Election Study) demonstrate that although there is generally no gender gap in first-order elections, women tend to vote less than men in second-order contests. This reflects lower levels of interest in politics among women and their lower levels of knowledge about politics when it comes to second-order elections.
Acknowledgements
We thank Damien Bol, the members of the Research Chair in Electoral Studies at the University of Montreal, the participants in the 2016 ECPR general conference in Prague, and this journal’s reviewers and editors for helpful comments on the previous drafts of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Córdova and Rangel’s (Citation2017) results suggest that the traditional gender gap may still exist in national elections. However, their Table A1 in the online appendix reveals that this is the case only in young democracies and it is neither substantively nor statistically significant in any Western democracy but Switzerland.
2 For instance, in those countries and elections that we study below, the average within-country variance in official voter turnout rates across election types reaches 12.5 percentage points (elections covered by the Making Electoral Democracy Work project) and 26.1 percentage points (elections covered by the European Election Study).
3 Mondak and Anderson (Citation2004) estimate that as much as half of the gender gap in political knowledge is attributable to gender differences in the propensity to guess. Other scholars have suggested that conventional measures systematically underestimate women’s political knowledge because they implicitly limit the scope of politics to the traditional arenas of electoral and legislative politics (Smiley Citation1999). However, even if political knowledge questions are subject to these gender biases, this does not undercut their usefulness for predicting voter turnout since, to some extent, voting is similar to answering a knowledge-based question: if women are unsure about their preference, they may decide not to vote.
4 The samples are from Ontario and Quebec in Canada, Île de France and Provence in France, Lower Saxony in Germany, Madrid and Catalonia in Spain; and Lucerne and Zürich in Switzerland.
5 The complete list can be found in the online appendix.
6 The 24 countries are Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Countries that use compulsory voting are excluded.
7 Drawing on earlier research (Blais Citation2014), we expect national elections in Switzerland to be less relevant than in other countries and we therefore pool them together with Swiss subnational elections. This analytical choice is further validated by Table A6 in the online appendix, which shows that the estimated gender gap is of comparable magnitude in both election types.
8 We reran the analysis presented in including an interaction between gender and election types (see Table A5). The results reveal that women rate all elections as less important than men do. Women may be more interested in local politics than men, as some studies have found (Coffé Citation2013), but they do not rate local elections as more important than men do or more important than national elections (in both cases, it is rather the opposite).
9 The data are weighted to correct for over-reporting and correspond to the real voter turnout rate. This weighting has no impact on the substantive results of our study. More generally, it is true that a gender difference in over-reporting could, in theory, affect our analysis. We cannot address this directly since we do not have a validated measure of voter turnout at our disposal. However, previous studies of validated voter turnout (Karp and Brockington Citation2005) and survey experiments (Morin-Chassé et al. Citation2017) did not find consistent or statistically significant gender differences in over-reporting.
10 Unlike the EES data, the MEDW unfortunately does not offer variables pertaining to employment.
11 The use of a more direct question on attachment (Q43A-D) yields substantively similar results but, since the variable is available only for a subset of surveys, we opt for the civic duty question.
12 See Table A6. The only exception is the Madrid region where no significant gender gap was recorded in subnational elections.
13 We use political interest since the subsequent analyses show that it accounts for a greater share of the gender gap in voter turnout than political knowledge. The small gender difference group corresponds to the top 20% of countries with a substantively weak (<0.04) and, typically, statistically insignificant sex difference on the 0–1 scale of political interest.
14 An important exception is Sweden where women vote at higher rates than men in supranational elections.
15 We executed the decomposition via the Stata package Fairlie (Jann Citation2008).
16 Following other studies using the decomposition methods (see Fairlie Citation2005 Jones Citation1983), we do not interpret the unexplained part because of its ambiguity.
17 Following Fairlie (Citation2005: 309 n8; see also Jann Citation2008: 458), the pooled model used for extracting the coefficients contains the group dummy (Female).
18 Note that, as the decomposition includes only individuals with non-missing values on all the independent variables, the measured gender gap is slightly larger than in .
19 The only exception are Swiss elections where the gap is still significant but decreases from 11 to 5 percentages points. This residual gap is probably due to the singularity of the history of female suffrage in Switzerland. As Swiss women were enfranchised at the federal level only in 1971, it is possible that the effect of the lower degree of psychological engagement in politics is reinforced by additional generational and cultural barriers to women’s electoral participation.
20 The figure draws on average marginal effects, i.e. the predicted probabilities are calculated for all individuals keeping these individuals’ characteristics at their original values except for Interest (in Model 1), Knowledge (in Model 2), and Second-order elections.
21 In the online appendix, we present additional analyses to show that young adults, parents, and less educated respondents are more likely to drop out of voting in supranational elections and that this effect is diminished once political interest is controlled for (see Table A13).
22 As with supranational elections, the presence and degree of the gender gap in subnational elections is likely to vary cross-nationally as a function of gender differences in political interest and political knowledge (and also these elections’ importance). For instance, in contrast to the countries studied here, Childs (Citation2004) reports no gender gap in voter turnout in Great Britain’s local elections.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Filip Kostelka
Filip Kostelka is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group at the University of Barcelona and Associate Researcher in the Centre d’études européennes at Sciences Po, Paris. Previously, he coordinated the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project at the University of Montreal. His research on political behaviour and party politics has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, PS: Political Science and Politics, Research and Politics, Politics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Europe-Asia Studies. [[email protected]]
André Blais
André Blais is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Montreal, where he holds a Research Chair in Electoral Studies. He is a past president of the Canadian Political Science Association and past chair of the planning committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). He was the principal co-investigator of the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project. His research interests are voting and elections, turnout, electoral systems and strategic voting. [[email protected]]
Elisabeth Gidengil
Elisabeth Gidengil is Hiram Mills Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University and a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. Her research focuses on political engagement, voting behaviour and public opinion, with a particular interest in gender. [[email protected]]