The Gender Gap in Youth Political Participation: Evidence from Germany

In this article, we consider the gender gap in political participation by analyzing recent survey data about German adolescents. Differentiating between institutional, non-institutional, and expressive participation, we show that, even in Germany where there is strong gender equality, type-specific gender differences persist. Testing for resource, socialization, and attitudinal explanations, in multivariate regression analyses, we identify socialization in civic forms of participation together with the lower confidence of women in their personal and political skills as major drivers for the sexual differences in political engagement, especially so for institutionalized forms of participation.