Women, Men and Duty. The Relationship Between Gender and the Duty to Vote in Europe.

Despite its outmost importance for predicting voting behavior, we still do not much about the bases of the moral belief that voting is a duty. Most importantly, in the scarce literature analyzing the determinants of sense of civic duty, gender is a mere control variable. Yet its effects are far from being clear. On the one hand, on social norms point out than women embrace and enforce more intensely social norms than men. Sense of duty to vote being a social norm, women will exhibit higher levels than men. On the other hand, prior research shows that women are less interested in politics than men, particularly when it comes to electoral politics. This could lead women to be more reluctant to adhere to the norm that there is a duty to participate in an election. Which is it? The present research intends to determine whether women are more or less prone to feel the duty to vote than men, and what is the role of political socialization, morality and political engagement in the observed differences between men and women. For our purposes, we employ a cross-country survey conducted immediately after the 2014 European election in seven different West European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Greece, and Portugal.