Gender, voting, and womens representation in the 2016 Australian election

Abstract

This chapter investigates the gender gap in vote-choice evidence in the Australian federal election of 2016 by situating this gap in its historical context. Multiple explanations have been offered to understand why women are now more likely to support left-wing political parties in established democracies. They tend to fall into two broad categories capturing structural and cultural explanations. This chapter will investigate how well these explanations allow us to understand why Australian women favoured the Labor Party to a greater extent than men in 2016. Australian women were also more likely than men to vote for the Australian Greens in 2016. If we were to combine votes for both the Labor and Greens parties, the impact of women tending toward the centre-left would produce an even larger gender gap. This chapter, however, only focuses on the gender gap in favour of the Labor Party as it is one of the major two political parties in Australia. Also, the factors that explain the gender gap for the Labor Party might not be the same as the explanations for the Greens vote. Morever, since the Australian Greens are a smaller political party, the smaller number of respondents in the Australian Election Study who have voted for this party makes it difficult to investigate the gender gap in vote choice for the Greens.