Intergenerational gender differences in attitudes towards democracy

Gender differences in political values and participation are the focus of a growing bulk of research. Most studies on the matter tend to examine the extent to which men and women hold different sociocultural and economic values and political participation patterns, and whether this divide is becoming more pronounced across younger generations. This paper shifts the focus to a different type of ideological divide: attitudes towards democracy and democratic participation. Exploiting rich specially-designed post-election survey data from the US, UK, Italy, France, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and Spain, the paper examines intergenerational differences in how men and women conceive of electoral democracies – including feelings of political efficacy, what roles and functions they ascribe to voters and elections, how they feel towards citizens who hold different behaviours and beliefs, as well as the extent to which divergences on these aspects are motivated by personality traits. Results suggest that there are consistent intergenerational shifts on these dimensions, but also growing gender divides across the younger generations that appear to be largely motivated by different personality traits, most notably risk-aversion.