Explaining the Gender Gap: A Cross‐National Analysis of Gender Differences in Voting

Most modern democratic societies have seen a gender gap in voting in the last 10–20 years, with women in the majority on the political left, and men on the right. Despite the cross‐national nature of this phenomenon and the extensive amount of research on the gender gap, scholars have not succeeded in finding cross‐national explanations for it. Through a detailed specification of the causal effects at work, I outline a model that explains the gender gap in voting in different countries. I test the model by performing path analysis on data from the United States, the Netherlands, and Norway. The analysis reveals a strong effect of “feminist consciousness” on the gender gap in the US and in Norway.