Educational contexts and the gender gap in party support – an analysis of young voters in Germany

In many European countries, the most recent elections featured an unprecedented gender gap in party support among the youngest cohorts: young men disproportionally supported right-wing populist parties, while young women overwhelmingly voted for left-wing and Green parties. This paper explores the new gender vote gap by focusing on the role of education. We propose two mechanisms: placement and context composition. First, placement in lower or higher tracks is a signal of losing or winning in the context of ongoing educational expansion, and young men find themselves more often on the losing side than young women. Second, due to gender differences in occupational choices, lower tracks are more gender segregated than higher tracks, and an unbalanced gender composition often coincides with peers sharing either right-wing or left-wing political attitudes. We argue that this amplifies the new gender gap in party support. We test our arguments with unique data collected shortly after the German federal elections in 2025 among a large-N, register-based sample of 17- to 20-year-olds. Results show that young men on lower tracks are the most likely to support the right-wing populist AfD, and that the political climate in their educational contexts amplifies this association. Young women on both lower and higher tracks are likely to support the Linke, and more strongly so if more than half of their peers in class also are women. The Green party is strong among voters in academic tracks, particularly among women, regardless of the gender or political composition of the educational context.