Re-examining the Gender Gap in the Era of Women’s Suffrage

Did expanding the electoral franchise to women matter for electoral politics? This paper examines the effect of introducing female voters in five of the first countries to enfranchise women -- Norway, the United States, Sweden, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Using a difference-in-difference design and unique sub-national datasets, we report a remarkable finding that in four of five countries women's enfranchisement boosted support for Liberal and Labour parties. These results contradict both the “traditional” voting gap thesis -- which sees women as conservative voters prior to the 1970s, and the ``family vote'' hypothesis -- which suggests that female voters would merely replicate the vote shares for each party. Instead of viewing the impact of suffrage through these lights, we suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the greater political economy of the early twentieth century. At a time when women’s labor force participation was high, when social democracy was on the rise, and where marriage was later than it would be in the middle of the century, there are good reasons to believe that women may have held preferences for the redistributive agendas of left parties, making the impact of women’s suffrage a leftward push in partisan outcomes.