Sexism and the gender gap in far-right vote

As Hilde Coffé argues in her review of the question, we still miss a fully satisfactory explanation of why men are more likely to vote for far-right parties (Coffé, 2018). Sexism could be once of these missing explanations. Sexist attitudes can be held by both men and women in the same way as many women hold traditional views about gender roles (Cassese & Barnes, 2019b). However, men tend on average to score higher on sexism (Davis & Robinson, 1991; Simas & Bumgardner, 2017) which is expected to account for at least part of the gender gap. Using data for Spain we explore to what extent modern sexism accounts for the gender gap in far-right vote. Our analyses show that gender gaps remain after controlling for a number of attitudinal variables, but disappear once modern sexism is introduced in the models. The results indicate that 93 percent of the gender gap in the probability of voting for Vox in April 2019 can be explained by compositional differences in the characteristics of men and women, and that differences in sexism account for 87 percent of this portion. The corresponding figures for the following election are 74 and 63 percent, respectively. These findings bear important implications in the need to include measures of sexism to properly account for far-right vote and its associated gender gap.