International gender voting patterns

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Quite interested at how the gender gap manifests itself in different political cultures. I know in the UK women tended to be more conservative than men in the 50's but shifted left over time so now are more likely to vote LAbour. How is this different in other countries? (especially developing ones)

[Tender Branson]

Well, here's the "exit poll" from the Vienna state election in Oct. 2015:





And here's the same thing for the 2013 federal election:

[jaichind]

Taiwan Province ROC, women voters clearly lean Right/Blue/Unification while men voters lean Left/Green/Independence.  The gap is usually around 10%.

[FredLindq]

Sweden
All Red/Green parties are stronger among women.

The moderates and Sweden democrats are stronger among men, Sweden democrats much stronger among men. According to the latest opinions polls more women than men now supports the moderates, probably due to more men supporting the Sweden democrats.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Taiwan Province ROC, women voters clearly lean Right/Blue/Unification while men voters lean Left/Green/Independence.  The gap is usually around 10%.

did the gap narrow with Tsai?

[Hatman 🍁]

In Canada, men are more likely to be Conservative than women, and women are more likely to vote Liberal. For the NDP, it depends on how popular they are; their base is usually 50-50, but when they gain in the polls, it usually comes more from women.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A major problem you'll find with regards to this is that a lot of the relevant surveys - whether recent or historic - are less than reliable and sometimes actively dreadful. But way better than attempts to survey voting patterns of insert minority here *shudders*.

Quite interested at how the gender gap manifests itself in different political cultures. I know in the UK women tended to be more conservative than men in the 50's but shifted left over time so now are more likely to vote LAbour. How is this different in other countries? (especially developing ones)

The big MORI survey (which is the closest thing we have here to exit poll data) showed only a very slight difference.

[Phony Moderate]

Quite interested at how the gender gap manifests itself in different political cultures. I know in the UK women tended to be more conservative than men in the 50's but shifted left over time so now are more likely to vote LAbour. How is this different in other countries? (especially developing ones)

Some data I once saw showed a big gender gap in the 1959 general election; women voted Tory by something like 55-42 while men voted Labour by about 51-47. Here is the MORI data since October 1974: https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/101/How-Britain-Voted-Since-October-1974.aspx?view=wide

[jaichind]

Taiwan Province ROC, women voters clearly lean Right/Blue/Unification while men voters lean Left/Green/Independence.  The gap is usually around 10%.

did the gap narrow with Tsai?

Nope. The gap of 10% is with Tsai.  If it was not Tsai in 2012 and 2016 the gap would be more like 12%-13%.  If I had my way only women would be allowed to vote on Taiwan ROC which would bar me from voting if I had retained my ROC citizenship which is fine as I would get the election results I need.

[jaichind]

One of the main reasons why women tilt Blue/Right/Unification on ROC is that in most households it is the women that control spending and balance the budget.  This model is sort of breaking down with more women in the working place and with this newer generation but  usually the husband takes his paycheck and hands it to his wife who run the budget for the household with the husband getting an allowance from the wife.  This is actually fairly similar to Japan and less so Hong Kong and Mainland China.  So overall the women tends to worry about basic economic and political stability issues.  

One extreme example of this was the 2004 election.  The KMT-PFP ticket of Lien-Soong (the same Soong who ran in 2000 2012 and 2016) was ahead in polls by around 9% the day before the election over DPP Chen-Lu ticket.  The the afternoon before the election Chen and Lu were both injured by a couple of gun shots in what became known as the "319 Incident"  There were a lot of funny stuff about this attempted assassination similar to the JFK assassination like all sort of people associated with the assassination (the assassin, the gun dealer who sold the rifle all ended up committing suicide) but that is a separate story.   The key thing is that polls taken after the assassination attempt showed a 4.5% swing to make the election a virtual tie with Chen winning 50.1-49.9.  But a key finding of the post-assassination poll is that the women vote only swung less than 1% and the men vote swung 9% on top of an already skewed gender split for KMT/DPP to create the largest gender gap ever or since in ROC election history.  The women vote is all about cold policy calculations which could care less if Chen got shot or not.  The men vote, contrary to conventional gender roles, were the emotional voter.  The swing was 17% for the youth vote which implies that the swing for young men was most likely well above 20%.  

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Quite interested at how the gender gap manifests itself in different political cultures. I know in the UK women tended to be more conservative than men in the 50's but shifted left over time so now are more likely to vote LAbour. How is this different in other countries? (especially developing ones)

Some data I once saw showed a big gender gap in the 1959 general election; women voted Tory by something like 55-42 while men voted Labour by about 51-47. Here is the MORI data since October 1974: https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/101/How-Britain-Voted-Since-October-1974.aspx?view=wide

The reversed gender voting patterns also apply to the U.S. for the Presidential elections of 1952, 1956, and 1960, where Eisenhower swept the female vote and carried men by a smaller margin, while in 1960 women narrowly went for Nixon and men narrowly for Kennedy.

Just throwing that out there.

[jaichind]

In India, all things equal, even though there are no scientific polling to verify this, women tend to vote for parties of the Right, like BJP while men tend to vote for parities of the center-left, like INC.   This is mostly because BJP is associated with Hindu religious movements and women in India are significantly more religious than men.   Although women tend to vote for populist parties that often promise various "free stuff" (like free lunch for kids at school etc etc).   Recently the best way to attract the women vote is to promise to ban liquor.  JD(U) did well in the recent Bihar assembly election in part by their promise to ban liquor in Bihar.  Liquor is often the main the reason for domestic violence in India. 

[Asian Nazi]

The general international pattern is that women vote to the left of men in developed countries with mature democratic institutions but vote to the right of them elsewhere.

http://ips.sagepub.com/content/21/4/441.full.pdf+html

[Asian Nazi]

I also read an interesting article about how women voted immediately after enfranchisement in the United States.  Rather than uniformly breaking for the Republican Party as one would expect, women tended to vote for the parties with more established institutions in their state, i.e. Northern women tended to vote more Republican than men but Southern women tended to vote more Democratic than men.

[Asian Nazi]

The general international pattern is that women vote to the left of men in developed countries with mature democratic institutions but vote to the right of them elsewhere.

http://ips.sagepub.com/content/21/4/441.full.pdf+html

In general I believe that this pattern derives from the economic role that women play in a society.  Societies where women are expected to place a primary value on family, household, and religion and where they are not active participants in a wage economy engender them to more conservative voting patterns.  This is as opposed to societies where women are expected to be wage earners, and their values and voting patterns change accordingly.

[jaichind]

I also read an interesting article about how women voted immediately after enfranchisement in the United States.  Rather than uniformly breaking for the Republican Party as one would expect, women tended to vote for the parties with more established institutions in their state, i.e. Northern women tended to vote more Republican than men but Southern women tended to vote more Democratic than men.

My understanding is that in 1920 the new women voters tended to vote the same way their husbands voted which resulted in a net wash in terms of impact.

[Asian Nazi]

My understanding is that in 1920 the new women voters tended to vote the same way their husbands voted which resulted in a net wash in terms of impact.

Trying to find the journal article, but I have a terrible feeling it was in some archive I no longer have access to now that I'm no longer a student.  I cited it in a paper I wrote for a Women in Politics class I took a couple years ago.

IIRC the conclusion was that the only state women flipped in 1920 was Kentucky to the Democrats.

[Asian Nazi]

I don't think that this is the article, but its conclusions are similar:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1901657

[Zanas]

In France, women vote a little more for the PS, and somewhat more for EELV, and generally prefer more moderate options than men. FN vote is overwhelmingly male, FG less so but still male oriented in most cases, but not always.

[DavidB.]

In the Netherlands there is not much of a gender gap (at least not anything like the US, the UK or Austria), though men vote somewhat more for VVD (income-related reasons) and PVV (RRWPs as "Männerparteien") and women vote somewhat more for GL and PvdD.

[Hnv1]

There a minor gender gap with women voting more to the left here but it's pretty minor.

[palandio]

Official estimates for the federal elections in Germany since 1953 can be found in the following PDF on page 13 (except for 1994 and 1998):
https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/de/bundestagswahlen/BTW_BUND_13/veroeffentlichungen/BTW2013_Heft4.pdf

Summary:

- CDU and CSU have been more popular among women every time except 1980 and 2002, which is quite telling because these were the only elections where the CDU/CSU chancellor candidate was from the CSU (Schmidt [SPD] vs. Strauß [CSU] in 1980 and Schröder [SPD] vs. Stoiber [CSU] in 2002).
The gender gap was particularly wide in 1953-1969 and then in 1972 it suddenly narrowed from 10 percentage points to 3 percentage points.
In 2013 the results were 44.3% among women vs. 38.6% among men, a gap of 5.7% quite similar to the one from 2009 (5.4%), but much higher than the one from 2005 (0.7%)

- The SPD was stronger among men in 1953-1969. After that the gender gap was almost non-existent, except for 2002 and 2005, when women gave the SPD 3.5 and 2.7 percentage points more than men respectively.
In 2013 the results were 26.6% among men and 25.0% among women.

- The FDP has always been a bit more successful with men than with women, except for 1980. The proportional gap in recent elections has been slightly wider than in the past.
In 2013 the results were 5.5% among men and 4.1% among women.

- The Left (and its predecessor PDS) has always been a bit more successful with men than with women. The gap was particularly wide in 2005 and 2009.
In 2013 the results were 9.1% among men and 8.1% among women.

- The Greens were stronger among men in the 80s, but stronger among women in recent elections. The gap has widened.
In 2013 the results were 7.3% among men and 9.6% among women.

- "Others" have always been more successful among men, in particular in 1969, when the NPD got 4.3% and was included into the "others" (5.6%), "others" got 7.7% among men and 3.7% among women.
In 2013 "others" (including the AfD at 4.7%) received 13.0% from men and 9.0% from women.