This paper revisits the concept of ‘political masculinity’, used to interrogate political institutions and political elites, extending its use to investigate men as ‘political players’ in the form of voters. Our central argument is that party alignment and voting can be understood as avenues for gender performance, carrying greater salience for men than for women.
Existing literature on gender and voting behaviour has tended to ask why it is that - when all else is accounted for - women do not behave as men do. We turn this lens around, contending that men’s voting behaviour is incentivised by the need to perform masculinity in a social order where masculinity is difficult to obtain and easy to lose.
We theorise party alignment and voting as performative acts embedded within the broader ‘masculine domain’ of politics. We use this stance to reframe existing empirical work that has found men to be overrepresented within radical right electorates in Europe, whereas women are more likely to support green and left-leaning parties, proposing that these cleavages reflect distinctive modes of gender performance. For many men, alignment with radical right politics may serve as a symbolic reaffirmation of threatened masculine identities, signalling resistance to perceived loss of privilege. Meanwhile, the rejection of green ideology can be interpreted as a disavowal of ‘feminine-coded’ politics of care and environmental responsibility.
Our framework complements macro-structural explanations of gendered cleavages, which emphasise the erosion of male dominance via economic change, and meso-level explanations of institutional instrumentalisation of gendered issues. While micro-level social-psychology research on masculinity and political behaviour exists, it has largely relied on attempts to operationalise masculinity, with which we take issue. We pivot away from framing political preferences as adhering to ‘psychological characteristics’ men possess, reframing political attitudes as tools through which men perform their gender identity.
We conduct a meta-analysis of this existing research, reviewing how measures of ‘masculinity’ have been operationalised as traits individuals possess ‘more’ or ‘less’ of, exposing the epistemological tensions underlying such measures, demonstrating how our reframing of these constructs offers greater logical and theoretical coherence to this body of empirical work.
