The Move of Men to the Right of Women. Explaining shifting gender vote gaps in Sweden 1960-2022

Several indicators point to an increased ideological distance between men and women in Sweden as elsewhere in Western Democracies. This trend is however poorly understood, and that is for two reasons. First, although gender gaps are in focus, most studies to date use theories that focus on women's situation in society to explain emerging patterns. For instance, in studies on gender vote gaps in Sweden, a major theme concerns women's dual dependence on the welfare state which is expected to make them more likely than men to support parties to the ideological left since these parties tend to be those who support a comprehensive welfare sector (Naurin & Öhberg 2019; Oskarson & Ahlbom 2021; Oskarson & Wängnerud 1995). Second, time-frames used tend to be comparatively short and put too much focus on the rise of right-wing populist parties such as the Sweden Democratic Party and thereby neglect that the move of men to the right of women took place decades ago e.g., in Sweden already in the 1970s (Ahlbom et al 2021). In short, we propose that current ideological gaps between men and women should be seen as a “tip of an iceberg” where the long-term trends, causing shifting ideological beliefs and increasing gender vote gaps, not have been examined carefully enough. In this paper, we contribute with a renewed understanding of gender vote gaps in Sweden by instead of focusing on the situation of women in society, focusing on the situation of men and by scrutinizing an unusually long time-period, 1960-2022. By shifting our focus to theories that aim to explain the situation of men, our ambition is to develop two approaches on vote choice that need further theoretical clarification and empirical testing. We label these approaches (i) the state contraction approach and (ii) the feminization of the public sphere approach. The data used is the Swedish National Election Studies, one of the oldest election study programs in the world.