Our lifestyle has a direct impact on the way we perceive the world, and it is therefore unsurprising if it also affects our voting behavior. The question is particularly interesting considering the ongoing changes with respect to women’s place in the labor force and the ways in which it affects their world view and voting patterns.
Georgios Efthyvoulou, Pantelis Kammas and Vassilis Sarantides published a paper with some interesting insights on this topic, analyzing data from Greece’s 1953-1954 by-elections. The paper was based on two key observations:
In the 1953-1954 by-elections (first Greek elections with women participation), women in rural communities voted in a pattern similar to men, whereas women in urban communities were more likely than men to vote conservative.
Women in rural communities were more likely to participate in the paid labor force than women in urban communities. This observation is linked to the high social stigma of manual female labor outside the family (in rural societies women would work within the family business).
Adding these two observations together, the paper argues that, within the Greek 1950’s context, women that did not have a paid job were more likely than men to vote for conservative parties. In order to support this argument, the paper draws on two competing theories of female voting patterns: the ‘family vote hypothesis’ and the ‘traditional gender voting gap’. These theories are outlined below:
Family vote hypothesis: Women and men belong to the same family and therefore have identical interests. As a result, there will be no significant difference between their voting behavior.
Traditional gender voting gap: Women that do not participate in the paid labor force develop more traditional and family-orientated values, which makes them more likely to vote for a conservative party.
According to the paper, the ‘family vote hypothesis’ holds in agrarian societies, where men and women work together in their family business, developing similar voting interests. The ‘traditional gender voting gap’ holds in early-industrial societies, where women are more likely to stay at home and, as a result, develop more family-orientated values.
As a further note, the paper highlights the importance of the ‘modern gender voting gap’, which was observed in Europe and the US during the 1980s. The ‘modern gender voting gap’ relates to women’s higher likelihood to vote for left-leaning parties, as a result of the left’s stronger support for childcare and elderly benefits. It was also a period of booming female labor participation, as more service jobs became available, which were not affected by the ‘manual labor’ stigma. Adding all this together, a simplistic overview of the discussed framework is observed in the table below:
Table 1: Theoretical framework of economic change impact on male-female vote differences
Data: Bonsai Economics, Efthyvoulou et al (2020)
Naturally, the discussed framework is not near-exhaustive of the factors influencing female-male voting differences. However, it does provide a simple framework to think about possible links between economic change and female-male voting patterns. It also provides a great reminder of the extent to which our political views are intricately linked to our mode of life, constantly leaving us exposed to all sorts of bias.
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