The Myth of the Traditional Gender Gap? Evidence from Catholic Countries

Original

The Myth of the Traditional Gender Gap? Evidence from Catholic Countries

Evelyne Brie, Dawn Langan Teele

Abstract

abstract: In rich democracies today, women are less conservative than men. Yet for most of the twentieth century, politicians, pundits, and scholars believed that family life and religiosity tied women to conservative causes and parties. Recent scholarship has reexamined this traditional gender gap hypothesis but has done so in cases in which electorate-wide shifts to the left make it least likely that a conservative gender gap would emerge. This article scrutinizes a hard case, Quebec, a Catholic province in Canada that experienced a dramatic shift to the right after suffrage. Using Gallup polls and ecological inference techniques, the authors show that political geography drove gender preference gaps, with rural women voting more conservatively, and urban women more liberally, than men. In two other Catholic contexts, Austria and Argentina, they show that after suffrage women were not more conservative than men in general, undermining the traditional gender gap thesis in several crucial cases.