Labor Unrest, Ideology Formation and Female Participation in the 1930s

• In Event: Gender, Representation, and Leadership

Abstract

The turnout gender gap –difference in voting turnout between men and women– is one of the most commonly observed features in modern democracies. According to most of the available evidence on historical political economy, women were less likely to turn out than men when they got the right to vote. However, often these figures are based on simple comparisons of turnout rates between the pre and post female enfranchisement elections. Much less is known, however, about the root causes of female political participation upon formal electoral enfranchisement, and the variation in the magnitude of the gender turnout gap. This paper argues that past political experiences before the franchise might be key to understand women’s actual behavior when they got the right to vote. This question is analyzed by exploiting a wave of labour unrest in Catalonia during the early XX century – driven by the IWW in the 1915-1920 period – in the textile sector, prior to the introduction of female suffrage. We have compiled a unique individual evel data-set of official registers with individual voting roll-calls as well as other personal characteristics, such as age, address, gender and literacy. We have matched the individual voting roll-calls with local data. Specifically, we exploit detailed information on local industry composition and labour conflicts at the local level to investigate the political activation of women (via exposure to labor unrest and strikes) and its effects on electoral participation later on. We focus on the case of the Spanish Second Republic (1931-1939), that granted women the right to vote for the first time in 1933. We argue that the economic approach to understand the gender gap (Iversen and Rosenbluth, 2006), based on women’s outside options in the labor market, is important but not sufficient to comprehend differential gender turnout patterns. More specifically, we argue that, after female suffrage was introduced, the gender turnout gap crucially varied as a function of the previous political experiences of women, such as episodes of labor unrest in feminized industries in the period prior to enfranchisement, that served as a tool of political activation. In other words, women’s electoral mobilization was also a function of how politically activated they were prior to the introduction of female suffrage. This argument resonates with recent works such as Skorge (2017) and Morgan-Collins (2016), that also look at different forms on non-electoral political activation.

Author

• Francesc Amat, University of Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 585, Q0818001J, 08007 Barcelona