The Great (Female) Realignment
The FT has created a new app called FT Edit with unpaywalled access to some of its journalism.
One of today’s offerings is a piece by Stephen Bush, “Why are women voters moving to the left?”.
He’s not the first writer on this territory – see for instance this New York Times piece from January: The Gender Gap is Taking Us To Unexpected Places.
For a more academic source, see this paper from Inglehart and Norris. It concludes:
“Studies carried out in many countries in previous decades found that women were more conservative than men […]
“This study establishes that gender differences in electoral behavior have been realigning, with women moving toward the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies [….]
“…in postindustrial societies the modern gender gap was strongest among the younger age groups while the traditional gender gap was evident among the elderly. […] the process of generational turnover will probably continue to move women leftwards.”
As Bush notes, in the 2019 election in Britain, the average women was more likely to vote Labour than the average man by a startling 13 points.
Whoever cracks the political code of this ongoing shift looks set to do very well at the ballot box indeed.
The FT has created a new app called FT Edit with unpaywalled access to some of its journalism.
One of today’s offerings is a piece by Stephen Bush, “Why are women voters moving to the left?”.
He’s not the first writer on this territory – see for instance this New York Times piece from January: The Gender Gap is Taking Us To Unexpected Places.
For a more academic source, see this paper from Inglehart and Norris. It concludes:
“Studies carried out in many countries in previous decades found that women were more conservative than men […]
“This study establishes that gender differences in electoral behavior have been realigning, with women moving toward the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies [….]
“…in postindustrial societies the modern gender gap was strongest among the younger age groups while the traditional gender gap was evident among the elderly. […] the process of generational turnover will probably continue to move women leftwards.”
As Bush notes, in the 2019 election in Britain, the average women was more likely to vote Labour than the average man by a startling 13 points.
Whoever cracks the political code of this ongoing shift looks set to do very well at the ballot box indeed.