The Legacy of Gender-Unequal Regimes on Support for Women Politicians

This Paper studies generational differences in support for women politicians. This is important since public support for gender equality in the political sphere has been found to be important for improving women’s political representation in democracies (Paxton, Kunovich, & Hughes, 2007; Ruedin, 2012). Generational differences in such attitudes have implications both for future levels of support for women politicians as well as helping us to understand how support for political gender equality develops. Importantly, non-democratic political regimes differ in the extent to which women’s participation in politics is encouraged or facilitated. For example, state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe were formally committed to gender equality in public and political life, whilst in militarised authoritarian regimes in Latin America, women remained in traditional, familial roles although women’s movements played an important role in the transition to democracy. We argue that such variation has affected how publics in these countries see women in relation to politics and hence the support they have for female politicians after democratisation. Drawing on theories of generations and political socialisation, we expect the attitudes of those who are in their youthful, formative years to be particularly ‘impressionable,’ and hence we expect generations who experienced higher levels of women’s political and civic participation to have higher support for women politicians than those who did not. We use a newly-created dataset of individual-level data from multiple international and regional social surveys in conjunction with age-period-cohort analysis in order to identify generational differences in support for female politicians globally. This is matched with macro-level data since 1900 on women’s political empowerment, civil society participation, political representation, and political power from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset in order to test explanations for generational differences.