Generational change and the evolution of gender gaps in political participation in Western Europe (1981-2018)

Research on gender gaps in political participation lacks systematic longitudinal and comparative analyses that examine whether and why gender inequalities in political participation have changed over time. This paper fills this gap by adopting a theoretical framework that combines gender studies and political behaviour research, and a research design that compares different types of political participation (participation in national elections, institutional political activities, demonstrations, and petitions) and nine Western European countries, over a period of 37 years, using individual-level data from the European Values Surveys (1981-2017) and the European Social Survey (2002-2018). This research shows that gender gaps in political participation have become more “differential” over time: they have narrowed and/or disappeared, but they have also widened and reversed depending on the type of action. Our findings highlight that these “differential gender gaps” are mostly driven by gendered effects of generational affiliation which influence women’s and men’s levels of political participation, but in different ways depending on the type of political action studied. The size of the gender gap decreased or widened (in the reverse sense) in less time-and-resource-intensive political activities (such as demonstrating and petitioning) among the most recent cohorts, due to younger women’s higher levels of education and politicisation. Our results also reveal that the narrowing of the gender gap in time-and-resource-intensive institutional political activities (such as participation in political parties or contacting politicians) among the most recent cohorts is not due to a much greater involvement of women, but to a decreasing likelihood of men engaging in such forms of political participation, which in turn can be explained by generational differences in trade union membership in some countries.