Scholars identified the reversal in gender voting gap in many advanced industrial societies (i.e. women becoming more “left-wing” than men). This was attributed to value changes resulting from socioeconomic development, which led to higher female labor force participation and increased divorce rates (Inglehart and Norris 2000, 2003; Edlund and Pande 2002). Recent work revisits this gender gap critically (Giger 2009; Morgan 2013; Emmengger and Manow 2014).
Our paper contributes to this effort by going beyond placing gender gap on a simple left-right spectrum, in order to account for cross-national variation in policy platforms of left-leaning and conservative parties. We calculate country-level gender gaps for 14 established democracies using micro-level data from three waves of the ISSP Family & Changing Gender Roles survey, enabling us to control for multiple individual-level characteristics. The cross-national variations in gender gaps are interpreted in terms of country-specific socioeconomic differences, existing welfare states, and electoral context.
