Cross-national investigations of gender gaps in political engagement have assessed the impact of collective women’s representation—that is, the overall levels of women’s representation in a country—on a variety of measures of gender gaps in political engagement. Additional indicators of visibility such as presence of women in cabinet and executive positions have also been assessed. Yet, the role of political parties largely remains under-explored. Political parties play a crucial role in the political representation of women, and men, by mobilizing voters, by nominating candidates and them electing in the legislature, and by formulating policies that might address citizens’ interests and issues. In this paper, I investigate the extent of which political parties represent women and men through these three aspects—mobilization, election, and policy—and whether gender differences occur in how political parties represent citizens. In turn, I assess the impact of these differences on gender gaps in political engagement. Moreover, I hypothesize that the impact of party representation on gender difference in political engagement is conditional on party identification. Women should feel better represented when the party they prefer has greater women’s representation, which in turn will lead to smaller gender gaps in political engagement. The impact of party representation should be greater for women than for men since the former traditionally lags the latter in levels of political engagement. To test these hypotheses, I use data from the Comparative Study of Electoral System (CSES), which include questions on political engagement and electoral campaign contacts. I merge the CSES dataset with collected data on the percentage of women elected in the previous election for respondents’ preferred party and with data from the Manifesto Project Dataset on the electoral priorities for respondents’ preferred party.
