Unequal Risks: Explaining the Gender Voting Gap for Right-Wing Populist Parties

• In Event: Identity, Populism, and the Gender Gap in Vote Choice

Abstract

The rise of right-wing populism is often seen as a male-skewed phenomenon, where men are more likely to vote for right-wing populist parties. One influential explanation for this gender voting gap in the populism literature is that the manual occupations that have lost out to globalization and technological change are heavily male dominated. However, this explanation fails to take adequate account of women’s propensity to vote for right-wing populist parties. What is more, there is little understanding of when spouses align in their support for the radical right. We therefore propose and test a refinement of the labor market hypothesis, which incorporates the household division of labor. Drawing on the household bargaining literature, we argue that couples with a male-breadwinner division of labour will closely share economic interests and coordinate their vote choice accordingly. Economic shocks that affect the breadwinner, such as wage stagnation and heightened unemployment risk, will thus make both spouses more prone to vote for right-wing populist parties. Among dual-earner couples, on the other hand, we contend that spouses predominantly vote based on their own labour market prospects. Thus, economic shocks only contribute to a household gender gap in voting for right-wing populist parties when two conditions are met: they are a dual-earner household and the economic shock has a greater adverse effect on the man’s occupation. The central analysis tests our hypothesis by combining fine-grained European-wide labour force survey data with surveys detailing intended vote choice and spouses’ occupations. As the data utilised span the European countries, this also allows us to take a comparative perspective and investigate the role of economic factors that have been so far under-explored in the literature on gender and populism.

Authors

• David Thomas Hope, King's College London

• Oyvind Skorge, Harvard