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Gendered opportunities across modes of political participation: a macro–micro analysis of the gender gap
Abstract
We examine the role of ‘gendered opportunities’ for political participation by analysing original survey data covering nine European countries alongside relevant macro-level factors. We hypothesize that gender interacts differently with certain features of the broader context – here, government spending on public services – across various modes of participation, leading to ‘gendered opportunities’ for political engagement. By analysing data for three different modes of participation, namely voting, protest and consumerist participation, we show that the political context provides ‘gendered opportunities’ for political participation and that the gender gap is not homogeneously distributed across modes but varies depending on the repertoire. Our findings clearly highlight how the relationship between gender and the broader context for political participation is a complex one, suggesting that further work must consider the macro–micro linkages leading to differential gender inequalities in political participation.
... Important insights in this respect come from studies examining gender differences across different modes and forms of participation, especially when such differences are examined across national contexts (Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2010;Quaranta and Dotti Sani, 2018). In this context, Grasso and Giugni (2025b) examine cross-nationally the role of 'gendered opportunities' across three key modes of participation: voting, protest and consumer participation. Gendered opportunities here are provided by government spending for public services, a particularly relevant contextual aspect for the political participation of women, given the traditional division of labour between men and women in contemporary societies. ...
Given women’s gains in employment, education, and economic status, the persistent gender gap in internal political efficacy remains a puzzle for social scientists. We go beyond standard socioeconomic explanations and consider gender roles, which, unlike socioeconomic situation, are a slow-moving force constrained by gendered socialization. Stereotypically feminine traits jar with stereotypical notions of politics in general, as competitive, and leaders as power-seeking and assertive. Drawing on observational data from an original survey fielded in Spain, we show that this incongruence accounts for women’s perception of having a low capacity to participate in politics. Results from a survey experiment suggest that this relationship is not set in stone, however. When politicians’ motivation is framed in line with feminine traits—as a public service rather than a struggle for power—women consider themselves just as capable as men of participating in politics. The results have implications for women’s political participation and representation in politics.
This paper contributes to the literature by examining gender inequalities in political participation and political engagement among young people from a comparative perspective. By analyzing data on young people from nine European countries collected in 2018, we examine gender inequalities in participation in various modes of conventional and unconventional activism as well as related attitudes, broader political engagement and key determinants, cross-nationally, in order to provide a detailed picture of the current state of gender inequalities in political activism among young people in Europe. Our results allow us to speak to extant theorizing about gender inequalities by showing that the extent of political inequality between young men and women is less marked than one might expect. While the gender gaps in political participation for activities such as confrontational types of protest are small or absent, we find that young women are actually more active in petitioning, buycotting, and volunteering in the community. Young men instead are more active than young women in a majority of the nine countries analysed with respect to more institutional forms of participation linked to organizations and parties, various types of online political participation, and broader political engagement measures, such as internal political efficacy and consumption of political news through various channels. However, young men also appear to be more sceptical at least of certain aspects of democratic practice relative to young women.
The declining political engagement of youth is a concern in many European democracies. However, young people are also spearheading protest movements cross-nationally. While there has been research on political inequalities between generations or inter-generational differences, research looking at differences within youth itself, or inequalities between young people from different social backgrounds, particularly from a cross-national perspective, is rare. In this article, we aim to fill this gap in the literature. Using survey data from 2018 on young people aged 18–34 years, we analyse how social class background differentiates groups of young people in their political engagement and activism across nine European countries. We look at social differentiation by social class background for both political participation in a wide variety of political activities including conventional, unconventional, community and online forms of political participation, and at attitudes linked to broader political engagement, to paint a detailed picture of extant inequalities amongst young people from a cross-national perspective. The results clearly show that major class inequalities exist in political participation and broader political engagement among young people across Europe today.
To study the political mobilization of underrepresented groups, this article examines the effect of electoral systems on gender equality in voting. Theoretically, I argue that replacing a plurality electoral system with proportional representation (PR) gives party elites greater incentives to mobilize women to vote in all but the most competitive districts under plurality rule. Yet, they need to tap into women's networks to succeed with such mobilizing efforts. Empirically, I isolate the causal effect of PR by studying an imposed shift from plurality to PR in Norwegian municipalities. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, I estimate that the move from plurality to PR substantially decreased gender inequality in voting. The effect is most pronounced in previously uncompetitive municipalities and where women's networks are present. This study thus demonstrates how the social environment conditions the effect of democratic institutions on the political participation of marginalized groups.
Despite initial optimism, a gender gap seems to exist in online political engagement. In this article, we focus on online political discussion and show that women use the internet to discuss politics significantly less than men. We propose that this is a ‘new’ gender gap and not a simple reflection of the traditional gender gap in offline political discussion activities. A unique dataset from Germany facilitates an empirical comparison of online and offline political discussion and their explanatory factors. We contend that the online environment imposes additional obstacles to women’s willingness to discuss politics as the result of a hostile environment and distinct socialization patterns. The resulting gap is visible in terms of specific personality traits that women, in comparison to men, require to discuss politics online. Using the ‘Big Five’ personality trait repertory, we show that women that score high on agreeableness are significantly less likely to discuss politics online than men with the same trait. We also find significant differences in the way the personality traits extraversion and openness influence both women’s and men’s participation in online and offline discussion.
What are the conditions that promote gender equality in political participation? In this article, I propose that the presence of direct democracy expands gender equality in political participation by signaling the system's openness to women's voice, confirming their political competency, and highlighting their stake in political decisions. To test this argument, I leverage a quasi‐experiment in Sweden in the aftermath of the introduction of universal suffrage, where the type of municipal political institutions was determined by a population threshold. My findings lend strong support to the effect of direct democracy on the political inclusion of women. I find that the gender gap in electoral participation was smaller in municipalities using direct democracy than in similarly sized municipalities that only had representative institutions.
Social movements are an inherently complex, multifaceted set of phenomena, permitting any number of viable analytic perspectives. In the 1950s and the 1960s, scholars of contentious politics took the relations between social movements and their social and economic contexts seriously: Politics, for these early specialists, was part of the transmission belt from socio‐economic structure to movements. The first hints of a more political contextual framework for understanding and analyzing movements can be glimpsed in the work of Lipsky and Eisinger, who deployed the concept of political opportunity structure. Since then, countless movement analysts have contributed to the ongoing elaboration of the general political process framework. The chapter draws on these works and is organized into three main sections: (1) the ways in which the more enduring features of institutionalized politics help us understand the different fate of the same movements cross‐nationally or cross‐sectionally; (2) how the variable and changing features of institutionalized political systems influence the emergence and subsequent ebb and flow of movement activity; and (3) the most important lines of criticism and theoretical extensions currently enriching the perspective.
This article asserts that the impact of generational replacement on gendered political participation patterns is not sufficiently taken into account by existing analyses of participatory gender inequalities. In this longitudinal study, gender and generational differences in French protest patterns are systematically examined. The article tackles two interrelated questions: what is the impact of generational replacement on gender differences in political action in France, and from an individual-level perspective, how do we explain the different participation levels from different generations of women and men? A longitudinal quantitative analysis of survey data from the European Values Study from 1981 to 2008 confirms the significance of generational differences as well as the multi-dimensionality of participatory gender differences.
The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to
different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most
hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource-based
models since the 1970s, might have a role to play for explaining protest behaviour. While
most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual level, it is
likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, we examine the
ways in which individual-level grievances interact with macro-level factors to impact on
protest behaviour. In particular, we examine whether the impact of individual subjective
feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. We
find that while individual-level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to
have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and
political conditions. We interpret both significant results for the cross-level interactions in
terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest amongst those who felt
they had been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the
interaction of the contextual and individual level should continue to be explored in future
studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.
Sarah Pickard offers a detailed and wide-ranging assessment of electoral and non-electoral political participation of young people in contemporary Britain, drawing on perspectives and insights from youth studies, political science and political sociology.
This comprehensive book enquires into the approaches used by the social sciences to understand young people’s politics and documents youth-led evolutions in political behaviour. After unpicking key concepts including ‘political participation,’ ‘generations,’ the ‘political life-cycle,’ and the ‘youth vote,’ Pickard draws on a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to trace the dynamics operating in electoral political participation since the 1960s. This includes the relationship between political parties, politicians and young people, youth and student wings of political parties, electoral behaviour and the lowering of the voting age to 16. Pickard goes on to discuss personalised engagement through what she calls young people’s (DIO) Do-It-Ourselves political participation in online and offline connected collectives. The book then explores young people’s political dissent as part of a global youth-led wave of protest.
This holistic book will appeal to anyone with an interest in young people, politics, protest and political change.
Sarah Pickard is Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France. Her research addresses the interplay between young people, youth policy, political participation and protest in contemporary Britain.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Acronyms
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Introduction: from ‘apathetic youth’ to DIO politics and the ‘youthquake’
Part I
Terminology, concepts and debates on young people’s political participation
Chapter 2
Young people, youth and generations
Chapter 3
Defining and measuring political participation and young people
Chapter 4
The political life cycle, period and generational effects and the youth vote
Chapter 5
Young people, citizenship and citizenship education
Part II
Young people, political parties and electoral participation
Chapter 6
Political parties, political leaders, youth policies and young people
Chapter 7
Youth wings and student wings of political parties
Chapter 8
Young people, voter registration, voting, elections and referendums
Chapter 9
Young people, the voting age and votes at 16
Chapter 10
Young people and the 2017 General Election: ‘The Youthquake’
Part III
Young people and non-electoral political participation
Chapter 11
Trade unions, unionism and young people
Chapter 12
Young people and DIO politics (Do-It-Ourselves political participation)
Chapter 13
Young people, protest and dissent
Chapter 14
The criminalisation and repression of young people’s political dissent
Chapter 15
Conclusions
Index
// https://www.palgrave.com/fr/book/9781137577870
An illuminating analysis of the long and ongoing struggle of women in America to gain political equality and bring about change in public policy.
Women and Political Participationexamines the involvement of women in American politics, concentrating mainly on their participation since the birth of the second women's movement in the late 1960s. From the creation of grassroots and national organizations to voting and running for office, this thought-provoking volume explores the diverse ways in which women have affected change and achieved greater representation in political leadership.
Detailed discussions of key documents like the Declaration of Sentiments and the Equal Rights Amendment; political action committees such as EMILY's List, which supports pro-choice Democratic female candidates; Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and other activists; and groups like the League of Women Voters reveal the complexities of women's efforts to gain equality and identify the barriers that remain today.
Thirty years after Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, the United States still lags behind most Western democracies in national welfare systems, lacking such basic programs as national health insurance and child care support. Some critics have explained the failure of social programs by citing our tradition of individual freedom and libertarian values, while others point to weaknesses within the working class. In The Color of Welfare, Jill Quadagno takes exception to these claims, placing race at the centre of the "American Dilemma," as Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal did half a century ago. The "American creed" of liberty, justice, and equality clashed with a history of active racial discrimination, says Quadagno. It is racism that has undermined the War on Poverty, and America must come to terms with this history if there is to be any hope of addressing welfare reform today. From Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Quadagno reveals how American social policy has continually foundered on issues of race. Drawing on extensive primary research, Quadagno shows, for instance, how Roosevelt, in need of support from southern congressmen, excluded African Americans from the core programs of the Social Security Act. Turning to Lyndon Johnson's "unconditional war on poverty," she contends that though anti-poverty programs for job training, community action, health care, housing, and education have accomplished much, they have not been fully realized because they became inextricably intertwined with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which triggered a white backlash. Job training programs, for instance, became affirmative action programs, programs to improve housing became programs to integrate housing, programs that began as community action to upgrade the quality of life in the cities were taken over by local civil rights groups. This shift of emphasis eventually alienated white, working-class Americans, who had some of the same needs--for health care, subsidized housing, and job training opportunities--but who got very little from these programs. At the same time, affirmative action clashed openly with organized labor, and equal housing raised protests from the white suburban middle-class, who didn't want their neighborhoods integrated. Quadagno shows that Nixon, who initially supported many of Johnson's programs, eventually caught on that the white middle class was disenchanted. He realized that his grand plan for welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan, threatened to undermine wages in the South and alienate the Republican party's new constituency--white, southern Democrats--and therefore dropped it. In the 1960s, the United States embarked on a journey to resolve the "American dilemma." Yet instead of finally instituting full democratic rights for all its citizens, the policies enacted in that turbulent decade failed dismally. The Color of Welfare reveals the root cause of this failure--the inability to address racial inequality.
A feminist is a woman who does not allow anyone to think in her place.’ Michele Le Doeuff Spanning nearly two decades (1980-1996), the six sections of this reader investigate the debates which have most characterized feminist theory to date. Including articles such as ‘Pornography and Fantasy’, ‘The Body and Cinema’, ‘Nature as Female’, and ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, the extracts in Feminisms explore thoughts on sexuality as a domain of exploration, the visual representation of women, what being a feminist means, and why feminists are increasingly involved in political struggles to negotiate the context and meaning of technological development. With writing by bell hooks, Alice Jardine, and Andrea Dworkin, this multi-cultural Oxford Reader reflects the dynamic nature of feminist debates and the genuine diversity within current feminist theory.
Across most democracies, gender differences continue to define a variety of modes of political participation. Examining only electoral forms of participation limits explanation of how, when, and why men and women participate in the political process. We discuss how communitarian and private spaces are grounds for political participation. We call for considering a wider set of contextual factors to explain variation across place, time, and modes of participation. Further, cross-level links between the international, national, and local can help theorize how context creates opportunities and incentives for particular forms of participation. Specifically, taking into account the contours of women’s movements and women’s organizations may improve understanding of gender differences in political participation and in the understanding of social movements.
Research on political consumerism documents a persistent reversed gender gap, as women boycott and buycott products more often than men. Previous efforts to explain the reversed gender gap rely on classical theoretical models developed to illuminate gender differences in political participation in general. Accounting for socio‐economic and situational factors as well as socialization leaves a significant amount of the reversed gender gap unexplained, though. Adhering to recent empirical evidence of personality as an important factor influencing political behavior, we argue that gender differences in personality traits could provide an alternative explanation to account for gender disparities in political consumerism. We use original survey data specially designed to measure political consumerism in Switzerland, which also include the Big Five model of personality. We find empirical evidence that gender differences in personality traits, in particular agreeableness, explain a significant portion of the reversed gender gap in political consumerism.
The Golden Age of post‐war capitalism has been eclipsed, and with it seemingly also the possibility of harmonizing equality and welfare with efficiency and jobs. Most analyses believe that the emerging post‐industrial society is overdetermined by massive, convergent forces, such as tertiarization, new technologies, or globalization, all conspiring to make welfare states unsustainable in the future. This book takes a second, more sociological and institutional look at the driving forces of economic transformation. What stands out as a result is that there is post‐industrial diversity rather than convergence. Macroscopic, global trends are undoubtedly powerful, yet their influence is easily rivalled by domestic institutional traditions, by the kind of welfare regime that, some generations ago, was put in place. It is, however, especially the family economy that holds the key as to what kind of post‐industrial model will emerge, and to how evolving trade‐offs will be managed. Twentieth‐century economic analysis depended on a set of sociological assumptions that now are invalid. Hence, to grasp better what drives today's economy, it is necessary to begin with its social foundations. After an Introduction, the book is arranged in three parts: I, Varieties of Welfare Capitalism (four chapters); II, The New Political Economy (two chapters); and III, Welfare Capitalism Recast? (two chapters).
We compare gender gaps in attitudes towards redistribution and social spending across generations in the USA and Britain. We show that the US context, characterized by lower welfare provision, results in consistent or even widening gender gaps for generations born post-1925. On the other hand, the British context, characterized by higher welfare provision relative to the USA, exhibits a narrowing and closing of the gender gap for younger generations, for two out of three indicators of spending preferences. These findings provide some, albeit mixed, evidence that women are more consistently in favour of social spending and redistribution than men in contexts characterized by low welfare provision such as the USA. Where there are higher levels of social support, we argue women could become increasingly more likely to express a preference for levels of spending and redistribution that is similar to men's, narrowing the gender gap among younger generations.
Research on gender and politics has primarily focused on women’s participation in women’s movements and institutional politics separately. Our paper is innovative in multiple respects: First, employing a comparative perspective we analyse what impact gender regimes have on participation in street protests. Second, we study the relationship between participation in electoral and protest politics and how this relationship is gendered. Third, we compare the participation of men and women in social movements. We are able to do this by drawing on nuanced survey data of five street demonstrations in the UK and Sweden which we benchmark against the more widely used European Social Survey. Our comparative research demonstrates that involvement in protest and institutional politics varies by gender, country and context. Our findings have important implications for gender equality in terms of social inclusion and political representation and contribute to political sociology, sociology of gender, and social movement research.
This article investigates gender differences in political involvement in twenty-seven countries across four life course stages: home-leaving, partnership formation, parenthood, and empty nest. Single country studies show that these life events can hamper women's political engagement, but whether this finding holds cross-nationally remains unclear. Using European Social Survey data, we show that across countries "family intensive" life course stages have a stronger negative effect on women's involvement than men's, but more on political interest, party identification and activity, than voting or demonstrating. Further, women's macro-level political representation only partially accounts for cross-national differences in life cycle effects on political involvement.
In this article, we consider the gender gap in political participation by analyzing recent survey data about German adolescents. Differentiating between institutional, non-institutional, and expressive participation, we show that, even in Germany where there is strong gender equality, type-specific gender differences persist. Testing for resource, socialization, and attitudinal explanations, in multivariate regression analyses, we identify socialization in civic forms of participation together with the lower confidence of women in their personal and political skills as major drivers for the sexual differences in political engagement, especially so for institutionalized forms of participation.
In the last decades, political participation expanded continuously. This expansion includes activities as diverse as voting, tweeting, signing petitions, changing your social media profile, demonstrating, boycotting products, joining flash mobs, attending meetings, throwing seedbombs, and donating money. But if political participation is so diverse, how do we recognize participation when we see it? Despite the growing interest in new forms of citizen engagement in politics, there is virtually no systematic research investigating what these new and emerging forms of engagement look like, how prevalent they are in various societies, and how they fit within the broader structure of well-known participatory acts conceptually and empirically. The rapid spread of internet-based activities especially underlines the urgency to deal with such challenges. In this book, Yannis Theocharis and Jan W. van Deth put forward a systematic and unified approach to explore political participation and offer new conceptual and empirical tools with which to study it. Political Participation in a Changing World will assist both scholars and students of political behaviour to systematically study new forms of political participation without losing track of more conventional political activities.
The paper takes an innovative approach to the study of political participation by combining it with a gender studies perspective, investigating the role of structural and situational constraints in the highly gendered context of Italy. Such constraints channel women's time away from politics, but neither do they account for the whole difference, which calls for an additional explanation, identified with specific cultural constraints. As expected, there is a remarkable gap between women and men in traditional time-consuming political activities and situational constraints have a negative impact on women's participation, and surprisingly also have a negative effect on men's involvement. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
This article asserts that the impact of generational replacement on gendered political participation patterns is not sufficiently taken into account by existing analyses of participatory gender inequalities. In this longitudinal study, gender and generational differences in French protest patterns are systematically examined. The article tackles two interrelated questions: what is the impact of generational replacement on gender differences in political action in France, and from an individual-level perspective, how do we explain the different participation levels from different generations of women and men? A longitudinal quantitative analysis of survey data from the European Values Study from 1981 to 2008 confirms the significance of generational differences as well as the multi-dimensionality of participatory gender differences.
Successive studies have found a persistent gender gap in political knowledge. Despite much international research, this gap has remained largely impervious to explanation. A promising line of recent inquiry has been the low levels of women's elected representation in many democracies. We test the hypothesis that higher levels of women's elected representation will increase women's political knowledge. Using two large, comparative data sets, we find that the proportion of women elected representatives at the time of the survey has no significant effect on the gender gap. By contrast, there is a strong and significant long-term impact for descriptive representation when respondents were aged 18 to 21. The results are in line with political socialization, which posits that the impact of political context is greatest during adolescence and early adulthood. These findings have important implications not only for explaining the gender knowledge gap, but also for the impact of descriptive representation on political engagement generally.
How is symbolic representation to be conceptualized and empirically examined? There is no unique answer to this question and each of its possible answers raises particular methodological challenges. The Dialogues section “Investigating symbolic representation” explores new directions for theorizing about and empirically investigating symbolic representation. This collection of contributions seeks to advance the study of symbolic representation in three key ways. Firstly, we suggest that gender politics scholars need to conceptually clarify how symbolic representation should be understood. Secondly, this concern leads us to examining in a more systematic way what are the expected links between symbolic representation and the other two dimensions of political representation Pitkin distinguished – descriptive and substantive representation. Thirdly, we call gender and politics scholars to critically engage with the question about which methods and research tools may allow us to effectively grasp symbolic representation at the empirical level.
This article addresses how intersectionality can be applied to studies of candidate selection. Based on empirical examples on the three stages of candidate selection in Sweden, it concludes that intersectionality is of importance not only in addressing the intersections between different forms of inequality and the resulting hierarchies between them, but also in drawing attention to dominant categories in any given context. By asking ‘which women’ and ‘which men’ are included as aspirants, candidates, and/or elected representatives, the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in candidate selection can be brought to the fore, particularly the ways in which the ‘norm’ (usually white privileged men) remains in power.
This article discusses older women's participation in local political parties in the London area. Its analytical framework
draws on intersectionality as a perspective together with feminist political science and political gerontology. Empirically,
it refers to research in seven parliamentary constituencies, based primarily on semi-structured interviews, focusing on roles,
activities and contribution; underlying motivation; and experiences of marginalisation or exclusion. A complex picture emerges
with effects of gender and age-mediated, especially by political party and location. Experiences are found to differ in different
stages of old age, but there is no simple pattern of cumulative disadvantage for older women.
This article nuances the argument that ethnic minority women experience cumulative disadvantage within politics. Drawing on
the French case study, I demonstrate a complex relationship between gender and ethnicity. The gender parity movement saw ethnicity
as competing with gender and rejected claims for ethnic minority representation, but still drew attention to the homogeneity
of French politics. Descriptive representation of minority women is now slowly progressing, as they simultaneously promote
gender and ethnic diversity within politics. However, their inclusion is conditional on their willingness to act as symbols
of secularity and assimilation. This particularly constrains the substantive representation of Muslim women.
In most countries around the world, women continue to lag behind men in an array of political orientations and activities. Understanding why this is the case and why some countries have been more successful than others at moderating gender gaps in political involvement is imperative for producing stronger and more representative democracies. Cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors explain some of the gender gaps in political involvement, but not all of them. In this book, the authors argue that electoral institutions attenuate gender gaps in mass political engagement and participation by drawing women, an "undertapped" constituency, into the democratic process. Using cross-national and country-specific analyses, the authors show that electoral institutions play a complementary and significant role in reducing gender gaps in political involvement. The cross-national analyses draw on comparative survey data from a wide range and large number of countries. The cases draw out the processes underlying changes in political attitudes and behaviors with evidence from four country studies: New Zealand, Russia, France, and Uruguay. All four countries have altered their electoral institutions, either through large-scale reform of the electoral system itself or adopting gender quotas, allowing the authors to examine patterns of political involvement pre- and post-reform. The book finds that inclusive electoral systems that produce more proportional electoral outcomes have larger effects on women's political engagement and participation than on men's. Gender quotas also mediate women's engagement and participation, but to a lesser degree. On the whole, the book concludes that electoral rules designed to promote social inclusion in parliament are critical for promoting social group inclusion among the electorate. © Miki Caul Kittilson and Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer 2012. All rights reserved.
This article analyzes how the political participation of men and women varies across the life course in Italy. Various studies on the topic have looked at the effects of the life cycle on political participation by using age as a proxy. Participation, however, may not be simply dependent on age. Instead, it may be related to the roles individuals assume during the life course. For this reason, the article looks at how participation changes during specific life transitions, such as leaving the parental home, forming a union and becoming a parent. Furthermore, the article puts special emphasis on how ‘private inequalities’ in the household may become ‘political inequalities’. In fact, family roles and responsibilities can be constraints to participation, especially for women. The article finds that while leaving the parental home is positively associated with participation for both men and women, forming a union and being a parent is detrimental to the participation of women, but not to that of men.
State women's suffrage movements are investigated to illuminate the circumstances in which social movements bring about political change. In 29 states, suffragists were able to win significant voting rights prior to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In addition to resource mobilization, cultural framing, and political opportunity structures, the authors theorize that gendered opportunities also fostered the successes of the movements. An event history analysis provides evidence that gendered opportunity structures helped to bring about the political successes of the suffragists. Results suggest the need for a broader understanding of opportunity structure than one rooted simply in formal political opportunities.
Despite rapid changes in women's educational attainment and continuous labor force experience, convergence in the gender gap in wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s. Using CPS data from 1979 to 2009, we show that convergence in the gender gap in hourly pay over these three decades was attenuated by the increasing prevalence of "overwork" (defined as working 50 or more hours per week) and the rising hourly wage returns to overwork. Because a greater proportion of men engage in overwork, these changes raised men's wages relative to women's and exacerbated the gender wage gap by an estimated 10 percent of the total wage gap. This overwork effect was sufficiently large to offset the wage-equalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in educational attainment and other forms of human capital. The overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, where long work hours are especially common and the norm of overwork is deeply embedded in organizational practices and occupational cultures. These results illustrate how new ways of organizing work can perpetuate old forms of gender inequality.
Based on the analysis of the European Social Survey (2002), this study explores the nature of civic engagement and identifies
three main dimensions: political activism (such as political party or political action group involvement or demonstrations),
involvement in voluntary associations and political consumerism (boycotting, ‘buycotting’, and signing petitions). While political
activism and associational involvement accords well with traditional studies of civic engagement, political consumerism points
to a new pattern of political behaviour that has become popular in Europe in the past decade. Moreover, modelling the three
dimensions of civic engagement demonstrates that the socio-demographic profile of these activists differ from each other.
Particularly, political consumerism appeals more to people who have been traditionally regarded as less active, such as women,
the young, and those living in urban areas. These findings suggest that political consumerism reduces the participation gap
between different social groups and might carry important lessons for participative democracy.
There are two distinct bodies of research on candidate gender. The first argues that voters are not biased against female candidates. These studies are usually based on aggregate analyses of the success rates of male and female candidates. The second body of research argues that voters employ gender stereotypes when they evaluate candidates. These studies are usually based on experiments which manipulate candidate gender. This study seeks to unite these literatures by incorporating gender stereotypes and hypothetical vote questions involving two candidates in one model I argue that many voters have a baseline gender preference to vote for male over female candidates, or female over male candidates. Using original survey data, I find that this general predisposition or preference can be explained by gender stereotypes about candidate traits, beliefs, and issue competencies, and by voter gender. I also argue that this baseline preference affects voting behavior.