These two paragraphs seem to contradict each other. Women are overrepresented among undecided voters, and yet the female vote is less swingy than the male vote? How are both of those things true?
Because these women only
appear to be undecided, but are ultimately very predictable in their voting behaviour. To put it differently - they say they might swing, but ultimately, they don't.
Who wrote this, Rachel Maddow? I understand that the Democrats have done a better job reaching out women and minority voters, but I think this article is just biased. So there may be people who spew garbage in the Republican Party, but most of us aren't these sexist jerks, who hate women.
Yeah, that's one of the weaknesses of the article. The gender gap is not an US phenomenon, but exissts in most industrialised countries, as is demonstrated in
this study. Major underlying factors include better female education and higher labour market participation, as well as cultural factors (e.g. emergence of feminism, changing family patterns). There is nothing here the Republicans can be blamed about, aside from not noticing and/or ignoring these trends.
In order to give credit where it is due, here is the post which lead me to the study:
If anybody has further analysis on the female vote, please share it here (I have done Latin in school, so I am able to read some Italian).
I unfortunately don't have any recent research on this topic available right now, and also nothing specific to Italy. But I was interested if you have read some classic analyses of the gender differences in electoral behaviour? A good summary is the article "The developmental theory of the gender gap: Women's and men's voting behavior in global perspective" by Inglehart and Norris from 2000. Should be available online. They analyze three different periods: the traditional situation especially in 1950s, in which women were the more right-wing and conservative voters in almost every country, the shifting situation especially in 1970s, in which women slowly moved to the left (or men to the right) in many countries such as the US and Scandinavia, while in many others like Italy and Germany women were still considerably more right-wing, and the establishment of a new paradigm during the 1990s, in which women become the more left-wing gender in almost all developed countries especially because of young women being much more leftist than young men. Italy was one of the last European countries to move from the old gender gap to the new one, more or less simultaneously with the changes in party system in 1994.
