According to the conventional wisdom, the traditional gender gap in voting has disappeared or even has been reversed in most established democracies. Yet some recent studies found that women tend to vote less than men in European elections. We thus systematically explore the impact of gender on voter turnout in different electoral arenas using data from the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project. Our analyses reveal that although there is no gender gap in national parliamentary elections, women do vote less than men in subnational and supranational elections. We test several explanations for this discrepancy and find that it is due to women’s weaker interest in politics and their lower levels of political knowledge in second-order elections.
