How left-wing parties shape the voting gender gap across Western Europe

Abstract Empirical evidence suggests that the traditional gender gap in voting behaviour has been reversed in many advanced democracies. Cultural and structural factors have led the younger generations of women to shift from voting more conservatively than men to being more likely to support left-wing parties. Although these transformations have affected virtually all advanced democracies, empirical evidence shows that this gap is not uniform across time and space; there is significant variation in both the presence and strength of the association. In this paper, we argue that this variability can be partly explained by the role of left-wing political parties. In particular, we hypothesise that the modern gender gap is stronger when left-wing parties adopt progressive positions on both the socio-cultural and economic dimensions of politics. To test these hypotheses, 19 Western European countries are analysed using a dataset that integrates individual-level data from the European Social Survey (Waves 1–10) with party-level data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, covering 85 elections between 1999 and 2021. The results reveal that the modern gender gap is shaped by party positioning, with left-wing parties’ positions on both the economic and, most relevantly, the socio-cultural dimension playing a key role in reinforcing or mitigating gendered voting patterns.