Theories and measurement of political values and under-represented groups: the case of women in the UK

This paper argues that the primary divide in values (Inglehart, 1977; 1990) between safety and self-expression lies in a different place for discriminated-against groups. For these groups, certain values classified as self-expression instead speak to security. This affects both theories and the measurement of the main value cleavages that are used as predictors of voting behaviour. We show this with the example of women in the UK and the commonly used libertarian-authoritarian scale, demonstrating how it fails to measure the distinction between material and post-material values for many women. The effect of this is large enough to affect the measure's ability to predict men's and women's vote choices and to manufacture a “gender gap” in vote choice. Our contribution is therefore threefold: theoretical in revising an influential theory of values; methodological in terms of proposed measurement adjustment; and empirical in showing that the measurement of values in the UK context manipulates the gender coefficient in models of vote choice.