![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Will experience with direct democracy influence men's and women's political beliefs differently? Despite the closed gender gap in voter turnout, women remain less interested in politics and participate less frequently in non-voting activities than men. Scholars find women's lower sense of internal political efficacy as the origins of these gender gaps. In this paper, I examine whether the experience of direct participation in political decision-making alters women's feelings of internal political efficacy differently from it does men's. Building on the insights from the literature on the gendered psychological traits, I theorize that voting in referendums will promote men's internal political efficacy but not women's, because of women's greater susceptibility to the psychological costs of participation in referendums. Using an original panel survey conducted shortly before and after the 2018 abortion referendum in Ireland, I demonstrate the presence of the gendered effect in voting in referendums: While men reported increased internal political efficacy after voting in the referendum, women did not experience any meaningful change, even though the issue magnified women's psychological engagement with the vote. My findings suggest that differences in psychological dispositions between men and women create gendered reactions to citizen experience in the political arena.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2021.1929258.
Notes
1 Among these studies, Dyck and Lascher (Citation2009) consider differential effects by levels of political awareness and voter/ non-voter status. Bowler and Donovan (Citation2002) examine racial differences (whites vs. non-whites).
2 For this paper, my theoretical expectation considers how voting in referendums will generate gendered effects on internal political efficacy but does not offer a clear prediction regarding external political efficacy. Separating these dimensions is particularly relevant when studying the gendered gap in political efficacy, because gendered dynamics might appear differently in each (Fraile and de Miguel Citation2019).
3 While direct democracy offers policy-making opportunities for underrepresented groups, this does not imply that all citizens gain equal influence. For example, members of interest groups will have a greater influence in the process of referendums or ballot initiatives than non-members (Boehmke Citation2002).
5 Due to the high salience of the referendum, voters were relatively well informed about the issue on the ballot than other settings of referendums (Elkink et al. Citation2020). This feature also makes the case a conservative test for my theoretical argument: My empirical analysis tests whether voting in a referendum has a gendered effect on internal political efficacy even when the referendum's informational cost is not so high.
8 This paper focuses on testing the hypothesized gendered effect on political efficacy, and it does not directly test the assumption that gender differences in psychological traits will lead to gendered responses to voting in referendums. Testing this assumption will be a promising area for future research.
9 See Appendix B for the exact wording of the questions.
11 I report the results of this test in Appendix C.