Article
Reference
Gender Gap and Turnout in the 2003 Federal Elections
ENGELI, Isabelle, BALLMER-CAO, Thanh-Huyen, GIUGNI, Marco
Abstract
We examine the gender gap in turnout in Switzerland by analysing the 2003 federal elections.
Despite being a standard component in electoral studies, the gender variable is, in most cases, only used as a control variable and its effects and interaction are too often under-analysed. We focus on individual-level factors by looking at three types of explanations for the gender gap: (1) resources, (2) political motivations and attitudes, and (3) social capital and integration. Our analysis, based on binomial logistic regression models, shows that compositional and conditional effects play an important role in explaining the persistent gender gap in Swiss electoral turnout.
ENGELI, Isabelle, BALLMER-CAO, Thanh-Huyen, GIUGNI, Marco. Gender Gap and Turnout in the 2003 Federal Elections. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft , 2006, vol.
12, no. 4, p. 217-242
DOI : 10.1002/j.1662-6370.2006.tb00066.x
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:86061
Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.
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Gender Gap and Turnout in the 2003 Federal Elections
Isabelle ENGELI, University of Geneva Thanh-Huyen BALLMER-CAO, University of Geneva
Marco GIUGNI, University of Geneva
Abstract
We examine the gender gap in turnout in Switzerland by analysing the 2003 federal elections. Despite being a standard component in electoral studies, the gender variable is, in most cases, only used as a control variable and its effects and interaction are too often under-analysed. We focus on individual-level factors by looking at three types of explanations for the gender gap: (1) resources, (2) political motivations and attitudes, and (3) social capital and integration. Our analysis, based on binomial logistic regression models, shows that compositional and conditional effects play an important role in explaining the persistent gender gap in Swiss electoral turnout.
Keywords:Turnout, gender gap, resources, political motivations, social integration.
Introduction1
In the 2003 federal elections fewer women than men turned out to cast their ballots.
Although the difference in participation according to gender shrunk to 7% by 1995, the gap had once again doubled by 1999. According to the 2003 results, there is still a measurable gender gap: 53% of men, but only 40% of women, took part in the federal elections. Differences in the political attitudes and behaviour of men and women are well known in electoral research. In the 1950s and 1960s, the classic studies of voting behaviour identified women’s lower levels of political and electoral participation and attributed them to women’s lack of interest in political issues. Subsequent studies drew attention to the myriad forms of gender differences within political behaviour, which came to be known as the ‘gender gap’ (Wirls 1986; Inglehart and Norris 2000).
We can distinguish, at a basic level, between two main types of gaps: one that focuses on differences in political participation, and another that concentrates on differences in political attitudes and leanings (Conover 1988).2 As the gender gap in
1 We wish to thank Marc Bühlmann, Sarah Nicolet and Peter Selb for their valuable comments.
2 Conover distinguishes between four forms of gender gap: in terms of mass par- ticipation, voting choice, partisan attachment and political attitudes (1988: 985-986).
electoral participation has disappeared, if not inverted, in most western countries, this topic of research has largely been abandoned (Schlozman et al. 1994 and 1999; Burns et al. 2001; Verba et al. 1997; Inglehart and Norris 2003).
Swiss electoral studies have identified gender differences in turnout since the 1970s (Sidjanski et al. 1975; Penniman 1979). Later studies analysed the impacts of gender in terms of the resources required for voting (Ballmer-Cao 1978; Mottier 1993) or in terms of politicisation (Inglehart 1979). More recently, Sciarini et al.
(2001) demonstrated the combined effects of gender, age, and marital status on electoral participation in the canton of Geneva during the 1999 federal elections.
Wernli (2001) examined the interaction between gender and age in a study of the 1995 elections, while Kriesi (2005) examined this joint effect in a longitudinal study of popular votes.
Within the literature, we can identify three types of explanatory models for electoral participation on the individual level: the first model deals with resources, the second with political attitudes and incentives, and the third with ties to the community and social capital. Despite being a standard component in electoral behaviour studies, the gender factor is, in most cases, only used as a control, and its effects and interaction are too often under-analysed (Alvarez and Parini 2005).
We begin by examining the gender gap in electoral participation within the Swiss context before presenting the three explanatory models. We then show in our analysis, based on binomial logistic regression equations for participation in the 2003 federal elections that, although the three models of electoral behaviour can play a role in explaining the voting behaviour of individuals in general, the three models can also produce complex and joint effects on men and women.
We try to determine whether their respective impacts vary according to gender.
Following Howell and Day (2000), we have conceptualised two types of effects on electoral participation according to gender: compositional and conditional effects. A compositional effect means that there is an over-representation of women (or men) in the category of individuals that participate little (or actively) in politics, while a conditional effect means that there is a differentiated effect according to gender.
The gender gap in electoral behaviour
The gender gap in political participation was analysed quite early in the his- tory of electoral studies. Norris (1991) characterized the various treatments of the topic into three distinct approaches. The classical literature of the 1950s and 1960s first explained the differences in political participation in terms of women’s lack of interest in politics. Women were perceived as more passive than men
(Duverger 1955). This approach presumes that the differences between men and women are innate or are the result of the differing social roles and the traditional separation of the public and private spheres. In the second wave of studies, this classical approach was criticized for having an androcentric definition of political participation that did not take into consideration the “other” forms of political activity available to women, such as involvement in non-political associations (Sapiro 1983). Moreover, its undue focus on tenuous differences was also discussed. Finally, Norris identified a third wave of studies, termed
“the revisionist account”, which corresponds to the gradual disappearance of gender differences, particularly in the realm of electoral participation. In this approach, the explanation for the dealignment of gender differences in political participation, especially in electoral turnout, focuses on the social processes that level gender differences. Foremost, these include women’s broadened access to education and the job market. In fact, women in most European and North American countries had already participated at an equal level with men in the 1980s and 1990s (Christy 1987; Conway et al. 2005; Norris 2003).
The Swiss gender gap and the late access to suffrage hypothesis In Switzerland, however, we continue to observe a higher level of participation by men in federal elections and in popular votes.3 In Figure 1, we reproduce the evolution of the rate of participation according to gender in the federal elections since the 1971 introduction of women’s suffrage at the federal level. Although a gender gap has remained, with the exception of 1995, it has been decreasing. In 1971, there was a 20% difference; in the following elections, the difference was only half as large. Nevertheless, it must be noted that this decrease was due in part to the large decrease in the levels of participation by men. By 1995, the difference was down to 7% and was no longer statistically significant. Since then, the gender gap has slightly increased, due once again to changes in the level of participation by men, which increased over this period. The gender gap climbed to 14% in 1999 and 13% in 2003, thus approaching the ratios of the 1975 to 1991 period.4
3 In a longitudinal study, Kriesi (2005), following Mottier (1993), observed a continued gender gap in federal votes. He did, however, predict its eventual disappearance as the magnitude of difference has been steadily getting smaller over time.
4 The elections of 1995 present an interesting case. Women’s rate of participation did not increase, but rather the rate of men decreased 6% with respect to 1991. However, we should not underestimate too quickly the mobilising effects of the women’s movement in the first half of the 1990s, in particular the “Brunner effect”, named for the failure to elect Christiane
Figure 1: The evolution of the rate of participation according to gender between 1971 and 2003 (given as the % that participated)
30 40 50 60 70
1971 1975 1979 1983 1987 1991 1995 1999 2003
Women Men
Source: for 1971-1991, the “VOX Analyse”; for 1995-2003, the SELECTS data.
The most commonly given explanation for the consistency of the gender gap in electoral turnout in Switzerland is the belated women’s access to suffrage, which occurred only in 1971. The importance of a “training period” in voting rights has often been raised in the literature.5 This argument was frequently evoked in order to explain the slower than expected increase in the rate of participation of women in the first half of the 20th century. The explanation of the continuing gender gap in Switzerland, from this perspective, would then be due to the fact that the generation of women who were unable to vote as legal adults has withdrawn from the political sphere, whereas the younger generation participates at the same rate as men in public decisions. Inglehart (1979) observed that Swiss women voters took to the polls en masse already in the first elections, which constituted a rapid change in participation in comparison to other countries, and served to emphasize the importance of the frequency of popular votes. In addition, this explanation oversimplifies the complex processes of socialisation that do not suddenly stop upon reaching legal voting age. It also understates the impact of the social changes that have provided women with greater access to education and the job market, as well as other effects due to age (Ballmer- Cao and Sgier 1998; Wernli 2001; Sciarini et al. 2001). Women who did not have voting rights when they became legal adults could have obtained a familiarity
Brunner to the Federal Council in 1993, and the massive strike by women in 1991 in support of pay equity. These events reached beyond feminist circles to involve women from across Swiss society and likely contributed to stemming the reduction in the level of participation of women in 1995.
5 Mossuz-Lavau evokes an evolution in three stages: learning, taking off and autonomy (1997).
with voting as adults through their work and social activities. The increasing strength of feminist demands since the end of the 1960s could similarly have acted as a stimulus for individual mobilisation (Welch 1977). If this institutional approach has some merit, it does not, however, suffice to explain the electoral gender gap phenomenon in Switzerland. Our analysis focuses on complementary hypotheses, at the individual level, for the persistence of the gender gap in the 2003.
Explanations for the gender gap in electoral participation: resources, political attitudes, and social integration
The literature specifies three general types of explanations for the gender gap in political participation on the individual level. The first suggests that women participate less because they are unable to, due to insufficient civic resources. The second suggests that they participate less due to weaker political motivations.
The third suggests that they are not encouraged to participate as much as men due to a lower level of integration within their communities and networks of associations (Inglehart and Norris 2003).6
Resources
The structural explanation of the gender gap in political participation is rooted in the tradition of resource models (Norris 1991; Welch 1977). According to Verba et al. (1972), political participation on the individual level is largely determined by civic resources, i.e. time, money, and civic skills, which are usually the product of an elevated socio-economic status. It has been long argued that women’s resources, in particular their level of education and income, explained their lower levels of political participation (Ballmer-Cao 1978; Krauss 1974; Randall 1987; Welch 1977). This widely used explanation continues to be applied to various aspects of political participation (Schlozman et al. 1994). In this tradition, we can explain the levelling out of the gender gap in turnout by the social transformations that brought about changes in the status of women. The greater access of women to the highest levels of education and the job market explains the increase of participation by women (Inglehart and Norris 2003).7
6 For a more comprehensive synthesis, see Bennett and Bennett (1989), Welch (1977), Randall (1987), Flammang (1997), and Inglehart and Norris (2003). For an overall analysis of electoral participation, see Bühlmann and Freitag in this volume and Bühlmann (2006).
7 On the specific issue of the influence of professional integration, see Andersen (1975);
However, it has been noted that individuals with a relatively low level of resources still vote, as voting is considered to be a low cost - low benefit activity. Women should thus suffer less from the effects of their lower levels of resources. We are testing a model based on resources measured across levels of income and education, but we argue that although we need to take resources into consideration as an explanatory factor, resources do not suffice to explain differences in turnout.8
Political motivations and attitudes
According to Burns et al. (2001; see also Verba et al. 1995), the gender gap in political participation can’t entirely be explained by women’s lack of resources alone. Burns et al. underline the differences in political attitudes between men and women. This emphasis is on line with the general focus in electoral on the importance of motivations and predispositions towards politics9 (to cite only a few recent examples, see Bühlmann 2006; Kriesi 2005; Selb and Lachat 2004;
Wernli 2001). Out of a concern for parsimony, our model takes into consideration relatively stable motivations towards political engagement and attitudes linked specifically to the 2003 election.10 These more or less stable attitudes are interest for politics and party identification, to which we added a measure of political sophistication (Burns et al. 2001). The classic electoral studies frequently explained the deficit in women’s political participation by their lack of interest in politics.
The feminist theorists criticized this assessment by underlining that women were, given the traditional privatisation of their social roles, more interested in politics
Welch (1977); Andersen and Cook (1985); and more recently Togeby (1994); Schlozman et al.
(1999); Burns et al. (2001).
8 Age and place of residence have been integrated into our model as control variables.
On the effects of age and its interaction with gender, see Brunner (2001), Sciarini et al. (2001), and Wernli (2001). We primarily apply their conclusions in the section where we discuss the results of our study.
9 The literature long emphasized explanations relating to the differing socialisation processes of children. These processes, which began from a very young age, reinforced traditional roles according to gender by confining women to the private sphere. See Jennings (1983) as an example of this approach and Welch (1977) and Flammang (1997) for a critique.
10 See Norris et al. (2004) on the impact of other attitudes towards politics on political participation and Roig (in Sidjanski et al. 1971) as well as Ballmer-Cao (1978) on the effects of the feeling of efficacy on Swiss citizens in the 1971 elections. Other studies also tested the impact of gender consciousness, measured, for example, by the degree of personal importance placed on gender equality and by taking a position on the role of women in politics (Kay 1985; Gurin 1985). The SELECTS 2003 study does not contain these kinds of measures.
at a local level. To take into consideration this critique, we have created a scale of interest that includes interest for local, cantonal, and national politics. Political sophistication is measured by a scale estimating formal knowledge of the Swiss political system. The attitude towards the 2003 elections is characterized by the propensity to discuss elections. Verba et al. (1997) have raised the point that although the propensity to discuss politics is more of an action than a political attitude, it can constitute an indicator for measuring political engagement. It can be considered as a reflection of the attitude relative to an interest for politics, and thus constitutes a stimulating factor towards participation.
Social capital and integration
Our third model relates to the impact of social capital and integration on electoral turnout. The “situational” explanation for the gender gap is based on this perspective, which places an emphasis on gender roles, and specifically, the two, if not three, hats worn by women, who can simultaneously be life partners, mothers, and housewives (Campbell et al. 1966; Welch 1977; Sapiro 1983).
Women’s traditional roles as spouse and mother confined them to the private sphere and kept them outside of the political and economic spheres. At the very least, it is argued, the division of labour of family duties has a different impact on men than on women (Parry et al. 2002).11 In contrast, Sciarini et al. (2001) emphasize the integrating effect of marriage on the electoral voting behaviour of men and women. According to their analysis, widows, however, are those most likely to have low levels of participation.
Additional factors related to social integration can have an impact on the gender gap. The importance of being engaged in political, but also social and cultural, associations has often been raised in the literature (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Verba et al. 1995; Pattie et al. 2003).12 Inglehart and Norris (2003) draw attention to the fact that social networks and associations differ according to gender, with women being more involved in local networks of a social character, and men having more partisan and professional attachments.
11 The literature is, however, not unanimous on either the origin of the effects of family life or the consequences on individual political participation. For a review of the literature, see Burns et al. (2001). For the Swiss case, Ballmer-Cao and Sgier (1998) point to the varying impact related to the level of women’s professional activity. See also Alvarez and Parini (2005) on the impact on political engagement of different degrees of investment in domestic and paid work.
12 Verba et al. (1995) recommended that only active membership in an association should be taken into account, arguing that it is the actions carried out within the associations that promote individual mobilisation, rather than just passive membership.
Furthermore, Schlozman et al. (1994) have demonstrated that the lower level of integration of women within partisan associations is in some way compensated for by the mobilising effect of belonging to social and cultural associations. The growing literature on social capital also emphasizes the mobilising potential of community ties and integration into local networks.13 We conceptualise the model of social capital and integration in three dimensions. The first is related to marital status, to which we added a measure of professional integration as a control variable. The second dimension measures membership in associations.
Following the distinction established by Parry et al. (2002), we have separated political associations (political parties, unions, employee’s associations) from other types of associations (religious or cultural organisations, women’s groups, human rights groups, animal rights, consumer rights, and sports organisations).
The last dimension is related to integration within the community through the feeling of attachment to the community and the feeling of trust towards others (Hall 1999).
Compositional and conditional effects of gender
By reviewing the various explanations for the gender gap on the electoral level separately, it may be incorrectly presumed that these explanations are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, as Norris et al. (2004) and Burns et al. (2001) have emphasized, we must go beyond mono-causal explanations of the gender gap in order to evaluate their respective impact (see also Conway et al. 2005; Bennett and Bennett 1989; Welch 1977). We argue that in order to explain the differences in turnout from a gender perspective, some of the factors related to the three aforementioned models – resources, attitudes towards politics, and social integration – can have complex and joint effects on men and women. We try to determine whether their respective impacts vary according to gender. Following Howell and Day (2000), we have conceptualised two types of effects on electoral participation according to gender: compositional and conditional effects (Table 1).
The gender gap resulting from a compositional effect is due to the differences between men and women at the level of individual characteristics. In electoral participation, a compositional effect means that there is an over-representation of women (or men) in the category of individuals that participate little (or actively) in politics. According to the structural hypothesis of the gender gap, it is not the fact of being a woman or a man that explains the gender gap, but rather the difference in available civic resources (Parry et al. 2002; Welch 1977; Randall 1987). Thus,
13 Sciarini et al. (2001) tested the effect of the number of years of residence within a canton.
They found that this factor had a similar effect on men and women up until retirement age.
if women possessed a level of resources equal to men, they would participate as much as men. Similarly, electoral studies have insisted on the influence of interest in politics. The more interested an individual is in politics, the more he or she takes part at the ballot. The initial studies raised the issue of women’s lack of interest in politics. Based on these assumptions, we would presume that given an equal level of interest in politics, the gender gap would disappear. Individuals that are very interested in politics would participate in far greater numbers than those that displayed no interest, independent of their gender. The second type of effect is the conditional effect. A factor can have a differentiated effect. Two situations are possible. In the first case, a factor differentiated according to gender could have an effect on the rate of participation of one of the groups as either encouraging or discouraging participation. Schlozman et al. (1994) found that membership in non-political associations increased the likelihood of American women to be engaged in political activities by compensating for the inequality in civic resources. A similar effect, however, was not found with men. In addition, civil status can have a specific effect on women in the case of widowhood, which discouraged the participation of older women (Sciarini et al. 2001). A low level of political sophistication can also provoke a censoring effect that is greater for women (Frazer and MacDonald 2003). In the second case, a differentiated effect can mobilise one of the two groups and have the opposite effect on the other group. For Norris et al. (2004; see also Parry et al. 2002) the status of being married encouraged men to participate politically, whereas the domestic responsibilities kept women out of the political sphere. Sciarini et al. (2001), on the other hand, emphasise the integrating capacity of marriage for both men and women.
Table 1: A synthesis of the compositional and conditional effects on electoral turnout according to gender
Variables Compositional effects Conditional effects
Individual resources With equal resources, equal participation by men and women
Interest in politics With an equal level of interest, equal participation by men and women
Member of a social or cultural association
Would permit women to overcome the inequality of resources
Civil status (widowhood) Being a widow as an older
woman leads to reduced participation
Civil status (marriage) Integrating effect of marriage on men and women
Given the distribution of domestic responsibilities, married men would participate more than married women
Political sophistication Low levels of knowledge have
a greater effect on women than men
Data and methods
Given that our dependent variable, voting in the 2003 federal elections, is a binary variable (abstention or participation), we have used binomial logistic regressions.14 We conducted two series of analyses. The first consisted of the full data sample. We applied the series of models to assess the influence of the gender variable in comparison to the other variables in order to measure the compositional effects of gender. We then repeated the same analyses, separating men from women, in order to identify conditional effects (Welch 1977; Burns et al. 2001). The interpretation of the results of logistic analyses requires caution (see in particular Long 1997). We begin by discussing the regression coefficients, and then concentrate on predicted probabilities. Drawing upon the hypothetical profiles of individuals, predicted probabilities provide an illustration of the various effects of gender on electoral turnout. The predicted probabilities were simulated using Clarify 2.1 software (King et al. 2000). We employed the full data sample of the SELECTS 2003 post-electoral survey, including the cantonal boosts. In order to be able to interpret the results on the national level, we have applied a corresponding weighting (including for the results in figure 1), based on the actual size of the cantons (Selb and Lachat 2004). The difference between the actual rate of participation and the rate found in the study arises from a well-known situation. On the one hand, people interested in politics are more likely to participate in a questionnaire, and on the other hand, individuals have the tendency to overestimate their level of political participation (Joye 2000).
In our analysis, our focus of interest is less on establishing the actual rates of participation of men and women than on understanding why the phenomenon of gender gap persists.15
14 All of the variables were converted to a scale of 0 to 1. For further details on the operationalisation, see the appendix.
15 Burns et al. (2001) draw attention to the likelihood that men would have a tendency, on the one hand, to overestimate their participation more than women would, and on the other hand, to answer questions by trying to guess rather than admitting that they do not know the answer. We do not have the means to investigate this specific problem with the data available to us. Only the canton of Geneva, and only since 1995, categorizes ballots according to certain socio-demographic characteristics such as gender (see Sciarini et al.
2001 for a presentation and use of this data).
Results
The weak impact of resources on the gender gap
The first part of our analysis deals with the full sample without distinguishing between men and women voters. The analysis consists of evaluating the global impact of gender in comparison to the other individual factors that are considered in our models for participation in the 2003 elections. Table 2 shows the non-standardised coefficients from a series of binomial logistic regressions.
Our first goal is to assess the explanatory power of the three groups of factors discussed in the theoretical section above (resources, political motivation, and social integration). We began with a regression that only contained gender as a predictor, and we then added our models following the logic of nested models.16 This consists, in essence, of analysing the importance of the compositional effects relating to gender: to determine to what degree the gender gap that was observed in the 2003 elections is the result of an over-representation of women in the categories of citizens that participate the least in the vote.
We have drawn attention to the fact that the literature frequently emphasises women’s resource deficits in order to explain the difference in electoral turnout.
Our analysis demonstrates that this explanation is not really supported by the facts. Resources play only a minimal role in influencing participation rates in the 2003 elections. A gender gap persists despite taking into consideration the lower levels of education and income of women. In fact, ceteris paribus, more men than women turn out to vote. The gender effect, while remaining statistically significant, has nevertheless lost in importance. This first observation confounds the expectation generated by part of the literature. We cannot confirm the structural hypothesis in terms of gender-differentiated resources. These differences do have an impact on electoral participation, but they only very partially explain the gender gap in the 2003 elections. Our results coincide with the analysis of Burns et al. (2001) that had already shown the limitations of this type of explanation for the gender gap in political participation. Moving now to the impact of political attitudes on participation, our results consistently support the emphasis in the literature on the importance of political motivations and attitudes. The more individuals had expressed an interest in and knowledge of politics in general, and the more they had discussed the elections, the greater was the likelihood that they participated in the 2003 vote. This observation is hardly unexpected.
16 The logic of nested models consists of introducing groups of variables in subsequent models in order to evaluate their contribution to the overall explanatory power.
Table 2: The importance of gender on electoral participation in the 2003 elections (binomial logistic regression coefficients)
Gender Model 1 Model 2 Model 3
Constant .561*** -1.137*** -2.989*** -3.189***
Man .538*** .430*** .159 .126
Resources Age (35 to 44 years)
18 to 24 years -.137 0.47 .182
25 to 34 years -.257* -.230* -.217
45 to 54 years .519*** .442*** .454***
55 to 64 years .945*** .648*** .662***
65 years or more 1.492*** .976*** .1068***
Income 1.064*** .247 .029
Education .979*** -.037 -.058
Place of residence (countryside) .304*** .196* .145
Political orientations
Interest in politics 2.880*** 2.635***
Political sophistication 1.660*** 1.627***
Propensity to discuss the elections .788*** .779***
Party identification .832*** .793***
Social integration Marital status (married)
Single -.126
Divorced -.427**
Widow -.379*
Employment -.028
Community ties .455**
Active member of a political association .382**
Active member of a social or cultural association -.034
Trust towards others .120***
Nagelkerke R2 .021 .139 .405 .415
N 4903
* p<.05, ** p<.01, *** p<.001.
A much more striking result emerges from our analysis: there is a drastic decrease in the effect of the gender variable. Once political attitudes are taken into account, the effect of gender is no longer statistically significant. This result underlines the importance of gender for political attitudes and enables us to detect a first compositional effects. Women are less interested in politics than men, and this difference has a penalizing impact on their electoral participation.
The factors related to social capital and integration only slightly contribute to explaining participation. The use of these factors in the analysis does little to reduce the impact of the gender variable.
Based on these findings, we can draw a first conclusion. Our initial series of logistic regressions covering men and women enables us to seriously question the importance traditionally given in the literature to women’s lack of resources.
The analysis of resources, measured by income and level of education, does not amount to a convincing explanation for the gender gap in the 2003 federal elections. Political attitudes have greater importance both in terms of explaining participation in general and in terms of reducing the effect of the gender variable.
Based on our initial analysis, there are compositional effects at work regarding the difference in participation between men and women in the 2003 federal elections.
The gender gap is the result, at least in part, of the over-representation of women in certain categories of voters that are more likely to abstain from voting, in particular among people who have weak political motivations. However, to end our analysis with this observation would mark a return to the assumptions of the classical electoral studies that tried to explain the gender gap by arguing that women participated less in politics because of their weaker interest. Inspired by the strength of the feminist critiques of these simplistic explanations, which draw upon an indifference to the complexity of gender roles, the second part of our analysis investigates the conditional effects of gender. We wish to assess whether individual factors play the same role for men and women or whether some of them have different impacts according to gender.
Political motivations and marital status: between compositional and conditional effects
Table 3 shows the separate coefficients of our logistic regressions for men and women. We employed the same factors for the three explanatory models, with the obvious exception of gender. The conditional effects can be represented in two ways. On the one hand, an effect can apply only to women’s level of participation, but not to men’s, or vice versa. On the other hand, an effect could be stronger for one group or even opposite for the two groups.
All of the tested political motivations and attitudes have a positive impact on men’s and women’s level of electoral turnout. Party identification and the
propensity to discuss elections seem, however, to not have the same intensity.
The coefficient for party identification is noticeably higher for men than for women, whereas the propensity to discuss elections seems to have a greater impact on women. This would suggest that a greater propensity to discuss elections would provide a greater incentive for women to turn out to vote, and that party identification, often stronger for men, would have a greater role in their participation.
Table 3: The effects on electoral participation according to gender (coefficients of binomial logistic regressions separate for men and women)
Men Women
Constant -3.435*** -2.815***
Resources Age (35 to 44 years)
18 to 24 years .324 -.148
25 to 34 years -.369* -.104
45 to 54 years .503** .42**
55 to 64 years .386 .812***
65 years and over .1.046*** 1.074***
Income .530* -.382
Education -.080 -.019
Place of residence (rural) .211 .103
Political attitudes
Interest in politics 2.491*** 2.884***
Political sophistication 1.593*** 1.633***
Propensity to discuss elections .486** .977***
Party identification 1.110*** .559***
Social integration Marital status (married)
Single .146 -.371*
Divorced -.338 -.605***
Widowed .969* -.753***
Employment -.039 -.055
Community ties 1.044*** .022
Active member of a political association .486** .333*
Active member of a social or cultural association
-.203 .058
Trust towards others .107* .133**
Nagelkerke R2 .435 .402
N 2304 2598
* p<.05, ** p<.01, *** p<.001.
Table 4 illustrates the predicted probability to vote for four hypothetical profiles. We distinguished between two age groups: men and women aged 25 to 34 years and over 65 years. Our goal is to examine the voting gap between men and women in each of the two age groups according to the pre-defined profiles, rather than to explain participation in general.17
Table 4: Hypothetical voter profiles, political attitudes, predicted probabilities (in %) Man
25 -34 years
Women 25 -34 years
Man 65 years and over
Women 65 years and over Interest in politics
Weak 18 15 48 35
Average (0.5) 55 43 77 71
Strong 75 77 92 92
Political sophistication
Weak 33 36 67 65
Average (0.5) 53 57 82 81
Strong 72 76 91 91
Discussion
Never 49 40 80 68
Sometimes 57 48 82 75
Often 62 64 87 85
Party identification
Attachment 80 66 94 87
No attachment 57 52 84 78
Political sophistication tends to have a similar effect on participation for men and women. There is thus no conditional effect at work regarding the degree of objective political sophistication. It is therefore neither an encouragement nor an inhibitor to women’s differentiated participation on its own. There are, however, subjective attitudes that produce a conditional effect on the gender gap. A strong interest in politics offers a very strong equalising effect on women’s participation in both age groups. The more that women felt a concern with politics, the more they turned out to vote in the 2003 federal elections. The equalising effect is all the more important as women, particularly the elderly, seem more strongly inclined than men to abstain from voting when they do not feel a strong interest in politics.
17 The profiles correspond to individuals who are not active members of associations, are not identified with a political party, live in cities, and are married. The other independent variables were set at the average values for men and women respec-tively. We could have chosen other reference values. The predicted probabilities would not have been the same.
The propensity to discuss elections stimulates individuals in general, but its impact seems relatively stronger for women. The women that did not (or only occasionally) discuss elections tended to participate less than men, while women who had frequently engaged in political discussions participated at the same level as men. If we highlight the equalising effect that an interest in politics and discussions about politics can have on women’s participation, we must also emphasise that a lower level of interest and discussion will have a greater penalizing effect on women. At a low level of interest and discussion, women take part less than men do. In contrast to political sophistication, an active involvement in elections would seem to be more important for women’s mobilisation than for men’s. Party identification, however, creates a stronger stimulus for men and leads to a greater gender gap in the younger age group.
What do these different impacts of political attitudes mean for an explanation of the gender gap? In the case of the 2003 federal elections, women were slightly less inclined to express an interest in politics and to discuss the elections. They also were less inclined to identify with a party, and obtained lower scores than men in response to questions regarding political knowledge. We have pointed out that these differences have electoral consequences. But in contrast to the classical interpretation of the gender gap, we have demonstrated that these compositional differences do not fully explain the gender gap. We must be sensitive to conditional gender effects. On the one hand, older women expressed a greater interest in politics than younger women, and on the other hand, not being engaged by politics has a greater penalizing effect on women than on men.
The effects of social capital and integration offer mixed results (tables 3 and 5). In the literature, women are often described as being more integrated on the local level. The study of the effects of social capital on political participation is not yet very advanced. Inglehart and Norris (2003) emphasised that women were more strongly integrated into local networks that were less oriented towards politics. Contrary to expectations, community ties seem to have an impact on electoral participation for men but not for women. We also tested the impact of another factor related to social integration: inter-personal trust.
We observed rather weak but similar effects in men and women, in that people with greater trust will participate more. With respect to political associations, men are clearly more involved in these kinds of associations, with the difference being less pronounced in the younger generation. However, this does not seem to lead to an added advantage in terms of the level of electoral participation. The difference in turnout between active members and others is very similar for men and women. In contrast to Schlozman et al. (1994), which found a positive effect on political activities from membership in non-political associations, our results do not show consistent support. Being active in social and cultural associations
does not encourage one group more than the other. Membership in these kinds of associations does not seem, at least in the case of the 2003 elections, to encourage women, who are well represented in these groups, to participate in greater numbers at the ballot. In terms of activities relating to the job market or to one’s studies, there is no influence on any of the groups.
Table 5: Hypothetical voter profiles, social capital and integration, with predicted probabilities (in
%)
Man 25 -34 years
Woman 25-34 years
Man 65 years and
over
Women 65 years and
over Marital status
Married 57 53 84 78
Single 61 44 86 72
Divorced 48 38 79 67
Widowed -- -- 93 63
Political association
Active member 68 61 90 83
Non-active member 57 53 84 78
Social and cultural associations
Active member 52 55 82 79
Non-active member 57 53 84 78
Community ties
Weak 39 52 72 78
Average (.666) 56 53 83 78
Strong 64 53 88 78
What is especially striking is the interaction of marital status and gender, which reveals compositional and conditional effects. Single women, divorced women, and widows participate less than married women. Men’s behaviour seems to be unaffected by marital status, the differences being non-significant with the exception of widowers. The different effects of marital status on men and women lead to two observations that are in partial agreement with the conclusions of Sciarini et al. (2001). In the first case, the fact that married women participated more than the others points to the integrative power of marriage for women. Secondly, the differentiated impact of widowhood needs to be further investigated. Widows over 65 years of age have a much lower probability of voting in elections. We must be careful to not overstate the importance of widowhood on the basis of a single election. This generation of women was
granted only belated access to voting rights and was socialised into traditional women’s roles. They also had fewer opportunities in terms of education and access to the job market.
Table 6: The effect of widowhood according to political attitudes for individuals over 65 years of age, with predicted probabilities (in %)
Woman 65 years + weak
politicisation
Man 65 years + weak
politicisation
Woman 65 years + strong
politicisation
Man 65 years + strong
politicisation
Widow 33 77 92 98
Married 51 56 96 94
Divorced 37 47 93 92
Single 43 60 95 95
However, it is important to underline that it is not simply age in concordance with a traditional socialisation alone that explains the lower levels of participation of older widows in the 2003 elections. Table 6 shows the predicted probabilities for the hypothetical individuals over 65 years old with average levels of education. In light of these results, we can better understand the combined effects of widowhood with a weak politicisation. Older widows seem to suffer the consequences of a weak politicisation much more than men. An older woman, widow or not, who has a high level of interest in the elections, who had discussed the elections, and who had a relatively high level of political sophistication, would participate at a rate very similar to a man with identical characteristics. In contrast, for a woman with a weak politicisation, widowhood would have a much stronger penalizing impact on the likelihood of her participating in an election.
Conclusion
Our analysis of the gender gap in participation during the 2003 federal elections set out to determine the causes of the gender gap. In order to accomplish this, we tested a series of hypotheses that are commonly put forward in the literature to explain the gender gap in political participation. We set out to examine two types of gender effects, namely compositional and conditional effects. The first hypothesis suggested that once the gap in levels of education and wealth between men and women was taken into consideration, the gender gap would no longer exist. We have shown that, although women had lower levels of education and income than men, this structural explanation of the gender gap was far from satisfactory in explaining the phenomenon of gender gap. The second hypothesis
was situational in nature. The conclusions put forward in the literature with respect to the impact of marriage and integration into the job market were contradictory. Our analysis has demonstrated, on the one hand, the integrating effect of marriage, but on the other hand, has also raised the issue of the singular effect of widowhood. In light of the cumulative effects of age and belated access to suffrage in Switzerland however, we must be cautious when trying to draw definitive conclusions about the impact of this status. Nevertheless, we pointed to the joint effect of widowhood and weak politicisation, which exerts a much greater penalizing effect on older women than on men. We also tested the influence of other variables related to social capital and integration that globally had a very small effect on both men and women. We nevertheless observed that integration into an associational and local network, in particular into political networks, modestly encouraged an individual’s participation, slightly more so for men than for women. Contrary to expectations, it did not in any case enable women to reach the same level of electoral turnout as men. These mixed results suggest we need to exercise caution when trying to evaluate the likely impact of these factors according to gender.
Finally, the explanation rooted in the politicisation thesis faired rather well in our analysis. By taking into consideration political attitudes and motivations, we were able to explain a large part of the gender gap by showing that participation was sensitive to political attitudes. Without being able to fully explain the gender gap, we have nevertheless accomplished more than simply reporting that the gender gap is due to a lack of politicisation of women. Our results suggest that gender gap studies must investigate conditional effects. We demonstrated that, in addition to the compositional effects linked to a weaker level of interest by women in politics, political attitudes exert different and differentiated effects according to gender. Women are more strongly affected by penalizing effects than men. Women seem to require additional encouragement to vote at the same level as men. A strong propensity to discuss elections could provide women with a form of actualisation of their interest in politics and encourage their participation.
It would be particularly interesting to study the sensitivity of these differentiated effects in light of the progressive integration of women into politics. In recent years, researchers have sought to uncover an impact of the growing feminisation of political activities. Although politics has long been a closed preserve and largely remains a male’s realm, it is nevertheless a field in constant transformation, with a constant increase in women’s participation in the decision-making spheres at the local and national levels. Several decades ago Inglehart (1979, 1981) emphasised the importance of national variations in the attitudes towards women. Norris et al. (2004) draw attention to the potential stimulating effect that the presence of a significant proportion of women in politics
can have on the political mobilisation of women. More specifically, Sapiro and Conover (1997) argued that the presence of female candidates increases women’s interest in political campaigns. Along the same line, Burns et al. (2001) found that the presence of female candidates seemed to encourage women’s knowledge of politics and increase their sense of efficacy, without having much of an effect on men in certain cases. Though these impacts could help to fully explain the slight gender gap in political participation that still persists in some countries, they have yet to be subject to an extensive and detailed empirical testing.
Appendix
The data and questionnaire are archived at http://www.sidos.ch.
Participation at the ballot: participation: 1 (coded as 1), abstention: 0 Resources
Monthly income: scale of 10 categories from 2,000 CHF to more than 10,000 CHF, recoded to go from 0 to 1
Level of education: scale of 3 categories, mandatory schooling and basic apprenticeship: 1, apprenticeship, diploma: 2, high school degree: 3; recoded to go from 0 to 1
Place of residence: urban: 0, rural: 1 Sex: male: 1, female: 0
Political motivations and attitudes
Interest in politics: additive scale of 5 categories based on the respondent’s interest in local, cantonal, and national politics; recoded to go from 0 (weak interest) to 1 (strong interest)
Political knowledge/sophistication: scale of 5 categories based on responses to questions regarding formal knowledge of the Swiss political system; recoded to go from 0 (weak sophistication) to 4 (strong level of sophistication) Party Identification: binary variable, with respondents that identify with a party coded as 1
Propensity to discuss the elections: scale of 4 categories, recoded to go from 0 (weak propensity) to 1 (strong propensity)
Social capital and integration
Marital status: 4 dichotomous variables: married, single, divorced, and widowed
Political associations: respondents that are active member of at least one political association: 1
Social and cultural associations: respondents that are active member of at least one social and cultural association: 1
Community ties: scale of 4 categories, recoded to go from 0 (no ties) to 1 (strong ties)
Work: the respondents that were actively involved in the job market (including a family business) and students: 1; respondents that were not active (stay at home, retired, disability insurance, unemployed): 0
Trust in others: scale of 5 categories recoded to go from 0 (no trust) to 1 (large trust).
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