With Maria Grasso, Queen Mary University of London
Department of Sociology (42-43 Park End Street) or MS Teams
Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm.
Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions.
Political participation is fundamental for functioning democracies. The existence of inequalities and gender gaps is concerning as it limits the possibilities of certain social groups to contribute to the public sphere and political decision-making.
While historically women have been understood to engage politically less than men given their more privatised roles of reproduction and unpaid labour in the home, over more recent generations the gap with men should theoretically be narrowing down over generations owing to a series of dynamics linked to modernisation and societal changes.
In this paper, we therefore focus on the socialisation component of the gender gap in political participation and study it across generations. We hypothesise that the participation gap should be narrowing down or even reversing if these dynamics are linked to modernisation. Moreover, we expect different types of dynamics for different types of participation. To examine these patterns, we analyse the available over time cross-national European Values Study data for a variety of Western European countries and applying age, period and cohort analysis.
In line with our expectations, results show that the gender gap in participation has closed or reversed amongst the most recent generations for all political actions studied except for party membership. Education, secularisation and liberal social values have a role to play for explaining this pattern but each to different degrees for different types of political action.
