Gender Polarization in Voting: The Role of Negative Campaigning

Abstract

Across the globe men tend to lean towards right-wing parties while women are more likely to vote left. In addition, there is a well-documented pattern which shows that negative campaigning tends to be more effective among male voters and that right-wing parties are more likely to employ negative campaign tactics. This leads to the question whether gender polarization in voting can be partially explained by men’s greater susceptibility to negative campaigning. To explore this, a large-scale expert survey (NEGex) was merged with a collection of post-election surveys (CSES Module 5) to extract a database of 45,000 respondents, covering 200 parties over 34 national elections.  The results confirm the hypothesis that the gender divide is partly due to men being more susceptible to negative campaigning, which right-wing parties commonly use more than their left-wing counterparts.