Finally rising with the tide? Gender and the vote in the 2019 British Elections

ABSTRACT

When it comes to gender and voting behaviour Britain had become something of an outlier. Whilst more countries shifted along Inglehart and Norris’ “rising tide” continuum from traditional gender gaps, to realignment, into modern gender gaps (Inglehart and Norris 2000, “The Developmental Theory of the Gender gap: Women and Men's Voting Behaviour in Global Perspective.” International Political Science Review 21 (4): 441–462, 2003, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Britain remained at the realignment stage. But in 2017 a modern gender gap emerged with a greater proportion of women than men voting for Labour, and a greater proportion of men than women voting Conservative. In this paper we examine the 2019 European Parliament and General elections to assess whether the modern gender gap persists in Britain. We show that whilst in the 2019 General election we again observed a modern gender gap, it nevertheless is rooted in the specifics of the political context in Britain, specifically post-EU referendum cleavages. Moreover, the gender gaps in the European Parliament election reveal a more nuanced picture, and demonstrate how the electoral context shapes the gender vote gaps we see. Our results indicate that the presence of the modern gender gap in Britain is contingent, rather than the result of long-term realignment, as well as provide evidence for key processes that may cause gender gaps to vary across time and space.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender vote gap
• voting behaviour
• General election
• European Parliament election

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/women-men-and-the-2017-general-election-by-jane-green-and-chris-prosser/

2 The difference between the 2019 EP election and the 2019 GE is even more striking if we look at the 2014 EP election for comparison (see appendix). In 2014, Labour and the Conservatives won a much higher share of the vote than in 2019 (combined vote share 48%), and the gender by age differences were very similar to those seen in the 2015 and 2017 GEs (see Sanders and Shorrocks 2019, and the discussion in the appendix for more information). The gender gaps in support for the Greens also did not vary by age in 2014, unlike 2019, and there were no gender gaps in Liberal Democrat support in any age group in 2014.

3 https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/rxpylj3uwa/Internal_Issues_191031_W.pdf. The open format ‘most important issue’ items in the British Election Study 2019 had not been coded at the time of writing.

4 The BES Random Probability Survey (RPS) for 2019 had not been completed when we did the initial analysis for this paper. We have subsequently replicated our analysis for the GE 2019 on the RPS. The gender by age differences in Conservative and Labour support are similar in magnitude to those in the BESIP, and they also behave similarly to the BESIP in the multivariate analysis. The statistical significance is weaker in the RPS, which is unsurprising given the RPS sample is much smaller than the BESIP sample. The RPS contains fewer of the variables we are interested in, and so we report the BESIP analysis in the paper and the RPS analysis in the appendix. This also keeps the analysis consistent between the EP election and the GE.

5 We also ran the analysis for each of the three nations (England, Wales, and Scotland) separately, as voters had different party options in the three nations. The results for each nation are very similar to those reported here. These results are available from the authors on request.

6 These gender gaps for 2019 were even larger in the BES RPS than in the BESIP. In the RPS, the Conservative lead over Labour with men was 18 percentage points, compared to just five points for women.