09:30 - 11:10
P6-S150
Room: 0A.08
Chair/s:
Paula Andrea Zuluaga
Discussant/s:
Giuseppe Carteny
Activating the gender gap: how party campaigning shaped gendered patterns of party support in the 2024 British General Election
P6-S150-2
Presented by: Ceri Fowler
Ceri Fowler 1, Rosalind Shorrocks 2, Anna Sanders 3, Rosie Campbell 4
1 St Hilda's College, Oxford
2 University of Manchester
3 University of York
4 King's College London
This paper considers how gender gaps in party support vary by electoral geography using the case of the 2024 British General Election. The field of gender and voting behaviour is large and well established but little research has considered the role that local election dynamics play in gendered outcomes. The overwhelming focus of the extant research is on national level gender differences in party of vote that rely heavily on sociological explanations for any divergence between men and women. Too little attention has been paid to how political campaigns influence variation in gender gaps across time and space. Recent work has returned to the role that electoral context plays (Shorrocks 2021 etc.) but has overwhelmingly focused on the national rather than local campaign. Here we focus on both the micro and meso sources of the gender differences in party support, investigating how individual decisions are shaped by the specific nature of party competition in electoral districts and how these aggregate to national gender gaps. We utilise discontinuity and matching techniques to establish how party campaigning (measured using local constituency spend) activates underlying gender differences in political attitudes and preferences.
Keywords: Elections, Geography, Gender, Multilevel, Local

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