The burden of time: Life cycle and the gender gap in political participation

One of the classical explanations for the persistent gender gap in political engagement focuses on situational factors, that is the still unequal distribution of unpaid work. The fact that women still dedicate more time to care and domestic work may depress political participation for several reasons. First, women might lack time to pay attention to politics due to the double shift when adding hours in paid and unpaid employment. Indeed, research shows that having kids reduces levels of political participation and political knowledge for women but not for men (Ferrín et al., 2019; Quaranta & Dotti Sani, 2018). Secondly, even the same free time, having a job in which politics is not relevant for workers are less exposed to heterogeneous social networks, and to direct and indirect mobilization networks imply fewer opportunities for women to get involved in politics (Schlozman et al., 1999). In addition to thinking about the amount of participation, we propose to look at the effect of the life cycle in the type of political involvement. And in particular to the distinction between local and national politics. There is the possibility that spending more time doing care work (elderly, kids…) makes women more aware of some social services that are commonly organized by local authorities. Furthermore, the networks developed doing such work (with other parents at school, in the playground, etc.) might include information on local politics to a higher extent than national politics, resulting in higher interest and saliency. The link to local participation might be direct, as some types of resources are available at the local level (i.e. public child care) or indirect by the specific policies provided by local institutions. To address these expectations we use a unique panel survey collected to a stratified sample of the Spanish population that incorporates detailed information on time use together with an innovative measurement of forms of political participation.