Gender and political participation: The variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to understand gendered patterns within forms and types of political participation

Abstract

The gender order in any society is reflected in a myriad of phenomena, among them political participation: Citizens’ propensity to engage politically is shaped by their gender, resulting in both traditional gender gaps to women’s detriment and modern gender gaps to women’s advantage as their participatory behaviours are compared to men’s. By now, this pattern has been observed over decades with regard to institutionalized versus more activist forms of participation, more public versus more private ones and traditional versus emerging forms. Moreover, the traditional gender gap in political participation continues to update itself throughout the era of digitalization, with men being more willing and more used to use digital platforms to express themselves politically than women. Seeing as such structural inequalities in citizens’ disposition to raise their political voice impacts democratic legitimacy, the continuous observation, description and analysis of these evolving patterns is imperative to further our understanding of citizenship as modern democratic societies navigate political, social and technological shifts and changes. In this panel, four conceptually and methodologically diverse approaches join forces in order to contribute to the understanding of contemporary gender gaps in political participation. The study presented by Catherine Bolzendahl and co-authors employs latent class analysis to explore how women and men pattern their engagement repertoires across offline and online forms of participation and finds that digitalization exacerbates traditional gender gaps, rather than ameliorating them. In an extensive conjoint experiment, Gema García-Albacete and Mónica Ferrín examine how specific features of political actions shape gendered preferences for participation. Drawing on a nationally representative survey of the Spanish population, their study disentangles how attributes such as time commitment, territorial scope, level of conflict, degree of collectivity, and type of organizer influence men’s and women’s willingness to engage. Katharina Heger uses MIMIC modelling of six types of political participation to demonstrate the difference between gender gaps in individual forms versus types of participation and how gender influences the latest addition to democratic citizenship in the digital era – online interventions against hate speech and misinformation. Finally, drawing on six decades of Swedish National Election Studies data (1960–2022), Lena Wängnerud and Patrik Öhberg trace the long-term evolution of the gender gap in ideological alignment and vote choice. By shifting the analytical focus from women’s to men’s trajectories, the paper develops and tests two explanatory frameworks—state contraction and feminization of the public sphere—to account for men’s gradual movement to the right of women in Western democracies.

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