Women and Politics in Western by Sylvia B Bashevkin

Author:Sylvia B Bashevkin [Bashevkin, Sylvia B]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136284625
Google: aVTYAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-28T02:39:35+00:00

a Positive values indicate a tendency for a vote for parties of the left to be associated with ‘10w’ values on the independent variables (e.g., unmarried, not head of household, lower and working class, etc.)

b P < .05

c P < .001

CONCLUSION

In this article, we have examined on an empirical level the implications of a growing literature on the political influence of contemporary feminism. Particularly in American studies of the ‘gender gap’, writers assume that feminism entails specific beliefs which, in political terms, translate into active support by women of the parties and candidates which best represent these beliefs. It is widely assumed that parties and candidates of the political left would thus be more favoured by women, and especially feminist women, than parties and candidates of the centre and right.

Our data fail to support this last assumption concerning the political impact of feminism in Western Europe. Using data from Italy, West Germany and the Netherlands, we found neither a tendency for women in general to be significantly more favourable towards parties of the left than men, nor a pattern for women with specific demographic attributes (including youth and university education) presumably predisposing them towards feminism to be more leftist than women with traditional backgrounds. Moreover, our analyses of Euro-barometer data did not support the view that women as a group are more likely than men to express feminist attitudes.

Rather, we found that the conventional wisdom identifying women as a conservative rather than liberal or radical political force was to some extent supported by our data. This relationship between gender and voting against parties of the left operated through the intervening variable of religiosity (as measured by frequency of religious attendance) and hence was qualified by the system-level variable of the salience of religion in each society. It would therefore appear from our study that where religion remains a strong social and political force among a large segment of the population, women as a group tend to be more religious than men – and since religious people are more likely to vote for non-leftist parties than secular people, we find that women are more likely to support the latter than men in such countries as Italy and West Germany.

Our results would seem to suggest that women in these three Western European nations are not a monolithic group in either feminist or partisan terms. That is, we found little evidence that men and women within nations differ attitudinally, a result which may be related to the relative newness of feminism as a political force, or to the absence of clearly distinguishable differences among parties on women’s rights and war/peace concerns.

The data available to us thus indicate that conventional values, which are shaped and represented by traditional European religions, are a much more powerful determinant of voting behaviour in Italy, West Germany and Holland than feminist values. Not only do women generally not vote as a bloc, but also those who would seem to possess demographic attributes making them ‘probable’ feminists do not appear to vote as a bloc in these cases.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.