Interested in (my) political news. An evaluation of the standard indicator in measuring the gender gap in political interest

A regular finding in public opinion and political behavior research is that women are less interested in politics than men are. Recent studies have challenged this common view by showing that there are significant differences in the political topics women and men are interested in. Allegedly, the classic indicator of political interest (‘In general, how interested are you in politics’) does not capture equally well women and men’s political interests (Ferrín et al 2020; Ferrín & García-Albacete 2019). The implication of this finding is that part of the gender gap repeatedly identified over time and across countries might be – at least partially – an artifact of the measurement instruments used in surveys. In this study, we put the classic indicator of political interest to the test. In 2019 we conducted online cognitive interviews to uncover women and men’s potential differences in the understanding and interpretation of the classic survey indicator. Based on these initial findings, we conducted a pre-registered experiment in 2021 whereby we offered interviewees the possibility to first read a piece of political news of their choice among six presented to them. The study compares levels of political interest of respondents with a control group receiving no information. The results confirm our expectations: First, individuals who are exposed to political news show higher levels of political interest than individuals in the control group. Secondly, women and men choose different news. Men select news related to political parties, parliament and economics to a higher extent than women do, while women chose news related to equality and policies such as health or education to a higher extent than men do. Finally, differences among the treated group and the control group are higher among women than among men. The paper presents and discusses these findings in light of their important implications for our understanding of the gender gap in political engagement, as well as for our interpretation of an extensively used survey instrument.