The ‘Man Question’ in Voting Behaviour

This paper revisits the concept of ‘political masculinity’, used to interrogate political institutions and elites, 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 gendered voting behaviour has tended to ask why it is that - when all else is accounted for - women do not behave politically as men do. We turn this lens around, contending that men’s voting behaviour is largely incentivised by the opportunity to perform their masculinity in the political domain. We theorise party alignment and voting as performative acts embedded within this domain. From here, we reframe existing work that has investigated men’s overrepresentation in radical right electorates in Europe, and women’s greater likelihood 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. Meanwhile, the rejection of green ideology can be interpreted as the disavowal of ‘feminine-coded’ politics of care and environmental responsibility. Our framework complements macro-structural explanations of gendered cleavages, that emphasise macro-structural economic change, along with meso-level institutional instrumentalisation of gendered issues for political purposes. While micro-level social-psychology research on masculinity and political behaviour exists, it has relied on attempts to operationalise ‘masculinity’ as a characteristic individuals possess ‘more’ or ‘less’ of. We pivot away from framing political preferences as arising from such ‘characteristics’, reframining political attitudes as tools through which men perform their gender identity. We conduct a meta-analysis of this existing research, exposing the epistemological tensions underlying their measures, demonstrating how our reframing of these constructs offers greater logical and theoretical coherence to this body of empirical work. We complement this with observational data from the latest round of the European Social Survey, which measures respondents' ‘subjective’ masculinity and femininity.