Impact of Women’s Representation on Gender Differences in Party Voter Support

• In Event: Gendering Party Politics

Abstract

Winning Over Women: The Impact of Descriptive and Substantive Women’s Representation on Gender Differences in Party Voter Support

Most political parties do not attract equal numbers of men and women voters. From green parties, which disproportionately draw women, to populist radical right parties, which disproportionately attract men, important gender gaps in party support exist. Relying on a unique and extensive dataset of men/women voter ratios by party family across Europe from 1985 to 2018, we explain variation in party gender gaps, across party families and over time. While previous studies highlight the evolution of gender gaps in voting across party families, with women increasingly supporting left-wing parties especially in Western Europe (Giger 2009; Abendschön and Steinmetz 2014), fewer studies investigate variation within party families over time. In particular, we seek to answer the following question: How do the descriptive and substantive representation of women affect gender differences in voter support for political parties?

Past work (Weeks et al. 2021; Meguid et al. 2021) has found that some parties introduce programmatic changes and/or increase the descriptive representation of women to target women voters when they perceive feasible electoral gains. In this paper, we explore whether this strategic use of gender representation affects subsequent gender balance in voter support for a party and whether this impact varies across different party families, from those with already women-dominant electorates (e.g., greens and Christian Democrats) to those facing a deficit in women voters (e.g., populist radical right parties (PRR)). We address these questions using original data on gender gaps in party support and on women’s descriptive representation from 28 Western and Eastern European countries from 1985 to 2018. These data are supplemented with manifesto data on substantive representation - both from the Manifesto Project (MARPOR) and from an original automated text analysis focused on PRR manifestos.

Authors

• Miki Caul Kittilson, Arizona State University

• Ana Catalano Weeks, University of Bath

• Bonnie M. Meguid, University of Rochester

• Hilde Roza Coffe, University of Bath