Heroines of the Ballot: The Gender Gap and the Costs of Voting

Abstract

Abstract We focus on the effect of gender upon the costs of voting (C). With the aid of the Making Electoral Democracy Work dataset, we unveil a systematic gender gap whereby women always perceive higher C than men. This gap holds for the whole sample and each of the countries, remains after controlling for a wealth of factors, and is robust to changes in the specification of the models. The gender gap is attenuated only by education and widens with the presence of children and political interest. Important normative questions related to the principle of political equality arise from this gap.