Women use less the left-right division than men. At the individual level, literature identifies that the main factor to explain the gap is women’s lack of cognitive mobilization. Compared to men, women still declare lower levels of political interest, despite the ever-decreasing gap in terms of educational attainment. However, cognitive mobilization is only one of the factors explaining the use and recognition of the left-right division. Researchers have identified another relevant individual factor: having developed party identification as the main cognitive shortcut to understand what left and right stand for.
In this paper, we focus on two contextual factors that could have a differentiated impact on the likelihood of using the left-right division. These factors are: (a) the years of democratic experience and (b) political polarization. Some authors argue that the percentage of citizens who use the left-right division to define their own ideology depends on the consolidation of democratic institutions. Citizens from older democracies have had more time to know and recognize what the left-right division is and means. Older democracies, additionally, are more stable and tend to have fewer changes in their party systems. Since one of the key dimensions of the left-right division is the partisan component, it is crucial to expect a higher percentage of citizens that use the divide. Political polarization also explains a higher usage of the left-right division. When parties are distant the ones from the others, citizens are able to recognize better what left and right represent, increasing the probability of defining themselves on the ideological space. Polarisation contributes also to increase information flows, which end up enhancing political interest and, more generally, cognitive mobilisation.
Scholars tend to think that those factors work in a similar vein to explain both women and men’s political attitudes. Nonetheless, the years of democracy and political polarization might have a different effect for female citizens. On the one hand, the years of democracy must include women’s right to vote, and related civil rights. We hypothesise that this variable only works for men, and not for women. For women, the years of actual universal suffrage should be more important. The same can be said about political polarization. Several studies underline the rejection of women to be involved in politics in contexts of higher polarization. That divergence between political parties may impulse the capacity of men to recognize and use the left-right division; instead, it might increase the distance between women and politics, which might imply a reduction of their levels of recognition of the left-right division. A higher refuse to place themselves on the left-right division is expected for female citizens.
To address our research question (Why do women use less the left-right ideology?) we propose that the contextual factors that have been traditionally used to explain citizens’ use of political ideology do not work for women as they do for men. To contrast this expectation, we use longitudinal data from Eurobarometer, since 1971 to 2019 comparing Western European countries.