Cohort Change in Political Gender Gaps in Europe and Canada: The Role of Modernization

AuthorRosalind Shorrocks
Published date01 June 2018
Date01 June 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0032329217751688
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329217751688
Politics & Society
2018, Vol. 46(2) 135 –175
© The Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0032329217751688
journals.sagepub.com/home/pas
Article
Cohort Change in Political
Gender Gaps in Europe
and Canada: The Role
of Modernization
Rosalind Shorrocks
University of Manchester
Abstract
This article finds firmer evidence than has previously been presented that men
are more left-wing than women in older birth cohorts, while women are more
left-wing than men in younger cohorts. Analysis of the European Values Study/
World Values Survey provides the first systematic test of how processes of
modernization and social change have led to this phenomenon. In older cohorts,
women are more right-wing primarily because of their greater religiosity and
the high salience of religiosity for left-right self-placement and vote choice in
older cohorts. In younger, more secular, cohorts, women’s greater support for
economic equality and state intervention and, to a lesser extent, for liberal values
makes them more left-wing than men. Because the gender gap varies in this way
between cohorts, research focusing on the aggregate-level gap between all men
and all women underestimates gender differences in left-right self-placement and
vote choice.
Keywords
gender gap, voting, generations
Corresponding Author:
Rosalind Shorrocks, Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Arthur
Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: rosalind.shorrocks@manchester.ox.ac.uk
751688PASXXX10.1177/0032329217751688Politics & SocietyShorrocks
research-article2017
136 Politics & Society 46(2)
Political gender gaps occur where men and women differ in their political orientations
and behaviors. Studying how societal differences between men and women contribute
to political gender gaps furthers our understanding of political outcomes in general,
and shows how gender roles and gender inequality influence political attitudes and
behavior. Such gender gaps are also of interest to politicians and political parties, who
often see them as an incentive to mobilize the “women’s vote” and to campaign on
women’s issues. Moreover, the existence of gender gaps in preferences and attitudes
has implications for representation. Unless we understand whether and how men and
women differ from one another, the extent to which male-dominated political institu-
tions fail to represent women cannot be fully known.
The political gender gap is dynamic over time. Until the 1980s and 1990s, men
tended to be more supportive of the left than women—the “traditional” gender gap.
More recently that situation has been reversed, with women more supportive of the left
than men—the “modern” gender gap.1 Inglehart and Norris2 suggest that this realign-
ment of the gender gap is linked to societal modernization, especially “increased
female participation in the paid workforce, the break-up of the traditional family, and
the transformation of sex roles in the home.”3 A key hypothesis stemming from this
argument is that the modern gender gap should exist among younger birth cohorts,
since those are the cohorts that have particularly experienced modernization. However,
among older cohorts, there should remain a traditional gender gap. Inglehart and
Norris refer to this as a generational prediction, and elsewhere Norris has termed this
the “gender-generation gap.”4
This generational prediction is underresearched. It has been examined in a cross-
national context only by Inglehart and Norris, who show graphical evidence for the
generational pattern, indicating that the traditional gender gap exists for cohorts born
pre-1930 and the modern gender gap for those born post-1960. Furthermore, they
present evidence from regression models that the modern gender gap is particularly
related to support for gender equality, postmaterialism, and attitudes toward the role of
government, arguing that women hold particularly left-leaning attitudes as a result of
societal modernization and so are to the left of men. However, this analysis is flawed
in three ways. First, the graphical evidence, which is the only test provided of the
existence of a gender-generation gap, pools together all “postindustrial” countries, not
all of which are available for all years in the data set used (the World Values Survey),
and so the observed cohort differences could be an artifact. Second, only the coeffi-
cient for gender, and not its interaction with age or birth year, is included in the regres-
sion analysis, despite the fact that they argue the gender gap should be different for
older and younger cohorts. Thus neither the existence of, nor the explanations for, a
gender-generation gap are tested for in these models. Third, their approach adds mul-
tiple possible explanatory factors to the model at once, making it impossible to distin-
guish which features of modernization are the most important.
Inglehart and Norris’s 2003 text is well known to scholars and students, but it is
important to revisit the generational argument they put forward for multiple reasons.
First, most research on gender differences cross-nationally in Europe focuses on the
aggregate-level gender gap between all men and all women. However, if Inglehart and
Shorrocks 137
Norris’s generational prediction is correct, this approach risks underestimating gender
differences, since the traditional gender gap in older cohorts and the modern gender
gap in younger cohorts could cancel each other out at the aggregate level. Indeed,
focusing on the aggregate-level gender gap tends to find gender differences that are
small in magnitude.5 Second, research focusing on the aggregate-level gender gap
assumes that a reasonable comparison can be made between all men and all women,
which is unjustified given considerable differences between cohorts of men and
women in factors relevant for political attitudes and behavior. If the modern gender
gap is found primarily for younger birth cohorts, our theories of gender differences
should focus on men and women in these cohorts rather than try to identify more “uni-
versal” differences between all men and all women. Third, ignoring the generational
argument may miss a key part of the explanation for the emergence of the modern
gender gap at the aggregate level: cohort replacement. As older cohorts with the tradi-
tional gender gap are replaced by younger cohorts with the modern gender gap, we can
expect to see a growth in the size of the modern gender gap at the aggregate level.
Although Inglehart and Norris have weakly demonstrated the existence of different
gender gaps in different cohorts, this claim is not taken seriously in the literature, and
most studies of the gender gap do not take the next logical step: to include an interac-
tion between gender and cohort or to analyze gender gaps within different birth
cohorts. The theory thus needs more rigorous attention to show its importance in help-
ing us to understand political gender gaps.
This article sets out to answer two questions: (1) Is there a gender-generation gap
in left-right self-placement and vote choice (hereafter jointly referred to as political
position)? And, if so, (2) what explains the gender-generation gap? I find that there is
a gender-generation gap in Western countries—specifically Europe and Canada—
where men of older cohorts tend to be more left-wing than women, whereas women of
younger cohorts are more left-wing than men. This suggests that it makes more sense
to talk of gender gaps, rather than the gender gap, since different birth cohorts vary
greatly in both the size and direction of political gender differences. Furthermore,
future analysis should focus on such gender gaps, rather than the gender gap, in order
to be more informative about gender differences.
Inglehart and Norris’s theory of modernization contains various distinct processes,
all thought to contribute to the gender-generation gap, but insufficiently disentangled
in their analysis. This article tests which modernization processes are most associated
with the gender-generation gap and finds that secularization is key: older cohorts of
women are more religious than men, leading them to be more right-wing. In younger
cohorts, religiosity declines, the gender gap in religiosity decreases in size, and the
salience of religiosity for political position declines. These developments are related
to the disappearance of the traditional gender gap across cohorts. At the same time,
the emergence of the modern gender gap in younger cohorts is connected to women’s
greater support than men’s for economic equality, redistribution, and state interven-
tion, as well as, to a lesser extent, their greater liberalism concerning values associ-
ated with sexual liberation (e.g., support for abortion, divorce, and homosexuality).
Women are more supportive of more left-wing economic attitudes than men in all

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT