Gender

Abstract

Until the end of the 1960s, women tended to have more conservative and traditional political orientations than men. Comparative studies indicated that women were more inclined to vote for religious and Conservative parties and less inclined to vote for socialist parties. According to the traditional gender gap, women were expected to be more conservative or centre-right than men, and a common finding in Catholic and religiously-mixed countries was that women were more likely to support the Christian parties and vote less frequently for the leftist parties. This was, for example, documented in Electoral Behavior: A Comparative Handbook (Rose 1974a), with data mainly from the 1960s in Belgium (Hill 1974: 92–4), Germany (Urwin 1974: 156–7), Italy (Barnes 1974: 191–2) and the Netherlands (Lijphart 1974: 255–6). Another major study (Dogan 1967: 159–67) documented large gender gaps in Italy and France. Women voted much more frequently for the Christian Democrats¹ in both countries, as well as the Gaullist Party in France, and much less frequently for the left. Gender differences were much smaller in Britain (Rose 1974c: 521–2) and Ireland (Whyte 1974: 639).