Research

How does party support for gender equality in the labor market affect the gender voting gap? A well-established argument from the literature on gender and political behavior states that working women tend to vote for left-wing parties more than men because they are stronger supporters of the welfare state. However, no study has assessed whether parties’ welfare positions affect the gender voting gap. Leveraging three decades of public opinion data from 16 Western democracies, I show evidence in support of that claim: increases in women’s labor force participation are associated with higher female/male voter ratios for the left only when those parties strongly support gender-egalitarian policies in the labor market. These findings confirm, but add nuance to the previous understanding of the gap: by focusing on public opinion, previous research overlooked party behavior. Therefore, my evidence elevates the importance of party strategy in explanations of gender differences in voting.

How did women’s access to formal employment affect the gender gap in policy preferences? Studies of the political economy of gender inequality argue that women became more supportive of the welfare state than men as they entered the workforce. However, we still lack causal evidence on the effect of outside-marriage options, such as simply being able to work, on the gender gap in support of welfare. This paper provides that evidence by studying the consequences of the end of the Marriage Bar in 1973, a widespread practice in twentieth-century Ireland requiring women to quit their jobs upon marriage.  A Difference-in-Differences analysis of public opinion data shows that, once the Bar was lifted, married women became less satisfied with their welfare benefits and time budget compared to married men, a signal of a growing divergence between their policy preferences and men's. These results align with explanations of gender gaps in attitudes based on household dynamics and help us better understand the causes of past and present differences between men and women’s policy preferences.