Women more social, men more careerist: How partisan personal ties shape gender differences for joining party youth wings

Despite the important role that youth wings play in socialising young women into party politics, we know very little about women’s engagement with these organisations. We investigate this by looking at whether women and men vary in their reasons for joining youth wings and why that might be the case. We theorize that women and men are attracted by different incentives and that the influence of partisan personal ties such as family and friends will influence the gender gap in incentives. We test our argument by using original survey data from over 3,400 youth wing members of the main centre-left and centre-right parties in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy and Spain. We find that women are more likely than men to join youth wings for social reasons, but less so for material ones. These differences are partly because, before joining youth wings, women have greater partisan personal ties than men.