In recent decades, differences between men and women have blurred in many social dimensions, including levels of educational attainment or access to the labor market. However, this increase in equality has not been reflected in a proportional reduction in the gender gap in political interest. This paper evaluates the extent of gender differences in political interest regarding different arenas, considering the moderating effect of marriage and caring for others using data from the Citizenship, Involvement, and Democracy Project. Although women generally find local politics more interesting than national politics, family, and caring responsibilities are still a source of disadvantage.

Despite recent advances in gender equality in political representation and the availability of resources, this article shows that there is a persistent gender gap in declared political interest over the life cycle. Using evidence from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we track the gender gap through the life span of citizens. At age 15, there is already a substantial gender gap of 20 percentage points in the probability of respondents reporting being politically interested, pointing to gendered socialization processes as the key explanation for such differences. In the following 10 years, as people develop into adults and unravel their political orientations, the extent of the gender gap continues to grow by about 10 additional percentage points. Following these formative years, attitudes crystallize and so does the gender gap, remaining at the same size (around 30 percentage points of difference between women and men) over the life course. These findings suggest that the development of gender roles during early childhood is a crucial phase in the source of the gender gap, deserving further attention from scholars.

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The implications of the persistent gender gap in political knowledge are a puzzle that the literature is still disentangling; and research has evidenced important differences in the way women and men respond to survey questions. We argue in this article that political knowledge survey items not only inform about differences in cognition but also about other latent traits related to gender stereotyping. Gender stereotypes around political knowledge push men to be knowledgeable but not so much women, which we expect to affect men and women’s survey responses differently. To test this expectation, we explore response times of do not know answers to political knowledge items. Our results show that men, particularly those who declare being interested in politics, take longer than women to admit that they do not know the answer to political knowledge items.

Crisis económica • Desafección política • Elección de partido • Nuevos partidos políticos • VotoResumen La desafección política, entendida como un sentimiento de alejamiento y desconfianza de la política, se ha convertido en los últimos años en una aplicación de uso corriente para fenómenos distintos y con resultados electorales aparentemente contradictorios. En este artículo examinamos qué partidos políticos se han beneficiado electoralmente en las elecciones generales de 2011 y 2015, un ámbito poco examinado por la literatura. Utilizamos la clasificación de ciudadanos propuesta por Montero, Navarrete y Sanz (2013), que combina confianza en las instituciones e interés por la política. Encontramos efectos solo en la elección de 2015. Los votantes desafectos tienen más probabilidad de votar a los grandes partidos que los ciudadanos críticos. Sin embargo, comparándolos con ciudadanos satisfechos, prefieren votar a los nuevos partidos. Key words AbstractPolitical disaffection, understood as a feeling of estrangement from and distrust of politics, has recently become a widespread explanation for different phenomena, as well as for apparently contradictory electoral outcomes. In this article, we examine which political parties benefited from political disaffection in the 2011 and 2015 general elections in Spain, an under-researched issue in the literature. To do so, we have used the citizen classification proposed by Montero, Navarrete and Sanz (2013), which is based on trust in institutions and interest in politics. We find effects only in the 2015 election. Disaffected voters are more likely to vote for mainstream parties than critical voters. However, compared to satisfied citizens, the disaffected are more likely to prefer new parties. Cómo citarLorente Fontaneda, Javier y Sánchez-Vítores, Irene (2018 42La desafección en las urnas: las elecciones generales de 2015 en España IntroduccIón Existe un pasaje de La República de Platón que ha sido interpretado como «los hombres incapaces de gobernarse a sí mismos acaban gobernados por alguien peor que ellos». Sin entrar a cuestionar la exactitud de la traducción del griego clásico, esta cita plantea un interrogante interesante que sirve de punto de partida a este artículo. ¿Cuáles son las consecuencias del alejamiento de los ciudadanos de la política? ¿Eligen estos ciudadanos buenos políticos? En el mundo moderno, el gobierno representativo no requiere el compromiso permanente de los ciudadanos, como sí se requería en los tiempos de Platón. Pero sí exige ciertos niveles de implicación política para que los políticos sean responsables y rindan cuentas de sus decisiones. Cuando los ciudadanos no tienen altos niveles de compromiso e implicación, ¿acaban eligiendo a los peores políti-cos? La respuesta a esta pregunta tiene una carga normativa que escapa a lo que puede apoyar la evidencia empírica presentada a continuación, sin embargo, sí que permite explorar si una implicación política menor lleva a los ciudadanos a elegir candidatos menos responsables.En un momento de p...

The media plays a prominent role in shaping individuals’ declared levels of political interest, but its role regarding gender differences remains largely unexplored. To what extent are media contents and their reflection of gender roles related to declared levels of political interest in men and women? This article argues that more egalitarian media environments, where a larger share of women are represented, should be associated with smaller gender differences in political interest. Data from the European Social Survey and the Global Media Monitoring Programme have been merged to test this argument. Results suggest that more women being reported shows some association with more minor differences between men’s and women’s declared levels of political interest. This difference is particularly present when the increase occurs in more hard-news-oriented media like the printed press and in topics like economic affairs, or when more women are quoted as experts, which are traditionally identified as more masculinised.

¿Se ubican los jóvenes de hoy más a la derecha? Existe una creencia popular de que los jóvenes de ubican más a la izquierda que sus mayores. Sin embargo, hay poca evidencia empírica sobre cómo funciona la edad a la hora de entender la ideología de los individuos. En este artículo, tratamos de analizar cómo funciona la edad sobre la ideología de los ciudadanos teniendo en cuenta tanto el efecto de la edad en sí mismo, el efecto de ciclo vital; como el efecto cohorte o generacional, derivado de la socialización política. La evidencia de este artículo apunta a que los jóvenes de hoy, si bien se mantienen más a la izquierda que otros grupos de edad, tienen preferencias menos de izquierda que los jóvenes socializados en los sesenta y setenta.