The Political Geography of the Gender Gap

This article leverages fine-grained municipal-level data from Sweden, including turnout figures separated by sex, to examine the political geography of the gender gap. Prominent arguments about the "traditional" gender gap claim that early on, women turned out at low rates and voted for conservative parties. Instead, I argue that when parties have clear geographic strongholds, gender gaps depend on population demographics and the mobilization of men and women in a given election. Using the computational method of bounds to estimate women's vote choice, I find that women in cities and large municipalities were much more supportive of the left than women in the countryside after suffrage. At the national level, high turnout among women in more populous municipalities drove the majority of women to support the left. These findings demonstrate that the partisan gender gap is not only a feature of gender but is also produced by electoral geography.