Gender gaps in voting behaviour have been increasingly attracting interest. Although the Donald Trump election in 2016 inspired around 60 studies on the impact of sexism on voting behaviour in the US, only a handful of papers on sexism and voting have been published in other countries. Poland is a particularly interesting country because the abortion ban, women’s strikes, and group appeals that made gender salient.
I start with a systematic literature review and discuss 97 papers dedicated to the influence of sexism on political attitudes and voting behaviour. The literature suggests that gendered attitudes rather than gender itself drive the gender gap. Importantly, different types of sexism have different impact on voting behaviour and policy preferences. Most commonly, scholars use the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI, Glick and Fiske 1996) to measure benevolent and hostile sexism against women. However, the same authors developed a scale of sexism against men, the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI, Glick and Fiske, 1999), which has been neglected in research on political behaviour and attitudes.
In an empirical paper co-authored with Mikołaj Cześnik we contribute to the literature on political behaviour by including AMI as a predictor of political behaviour and attitudes. In particular, we test whether hostile attitudes toward men distinctly shape political behaviour. We are also the first to test whether sexism (of any kind) predicts support for policies that discriminate against men. The analysis is based on the survey data from the Polish General Election Study. Our dependent variables are: voting/abstention, voting for radical right and left parties, and policy preferences in three gendered areas: retirement age (currently unequal for women and men), military duties (now covering only men) and abortion laws (recently restricted). The preliminary results show that particularly benevolent sexism (rather than gender) toward women and men influences attitudes and behaviour.
Michał Gulczyński is a PhD candidate in Public Policy and Administration at the Bocconi University in Milan. He studies the role of gender in politics, public policy, migration and education. He holds bachelor’s degrees in International Economics and Iberian Studies from the University of Warsaw and master’s degrees in East European Studies from the Free University Berlin and European Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Europe. He spent exchange semesters at the University of Chile, Xaverian Pontifical University of Bogotá, University of Barcelona, Higher School of Economics in Moscow and University of Padua. During his PhD studies, he visited Brown University in Providence and European University Institute in Florence. He was a trainee at the European Commission and at Polish Embassies. He co-founded the Polish Association for Boys and Men. He co-organizes the Polish Quantitative Political Studies Workshop.