International gender voting patterns

[jaichind]

Taiwan Province ROC, women voters clearly lean Right/Blue/Unification while men voters lean Left/Green/Independence.  The gap is usually around 10%.

[jaichind]

Taiwan Province ROC, women voters clearly lean Right/Blue/Unification while men voters lean Left/Green/Independence.  The gap is usually around 10%.

did the gap narrow with Tsai?

Nope. The gap of 10% is with Tsai.  If it was not Tsai in 2012 and 2016 the gap would be more like 12%-13%.  If I had my way only women would be allowed to vote on Taiwan ROC which would bar me from voting if I had retained my ROC citizenship which is fine as I would get the election results I need.

[jaichind]

One of the main reasons why women tilt Blue/Right/Unification on ROC is that in most households it is the women that control spending and balance the budget.  This model is sort of breaking down with more women in the working place and with this newer generation but  usually the husband takes his paycheck and hands it to his wife who run the budget for the household with the husband getting an allowance from the wife.  This is actually fairly similar to Japan and less so Hong Kong and Mainland China.  So overall the women tends to worry about basic economic and political stability issues.  

One extreme example of this was the 2004 election.  The KMT-PFP ticket of Lien-Soong (the same Soong who ran in 2000 2012 and 2016) was ahead in polls by around 9% the day before the election over DPP Chen-Lu ticket.  The the afternoon before the election Chen and Lu were both injured by a couple of gun shots in what became known as the "319 Incident"  There were a lot of funny stuff about this attempted assassination similar to the JFK assassination like all sort of people associated with the assassination (the assassin, the gun dealer who sold the rifle all ended up committing suicide) but that is a separate story.   The key thing is that polls taken after the assassination attempt showed a 4.5% swing to make the election a virtual tie with Chen winning 50.1-49.9.  But a key finding of the post-assassination poll is that the women vote only swung less than 1% and the men vote swung 9% on top of an already skewed gender split for KMT/DPP to create the largest gender gap ever or since in ROC election history.  The women vote is all about cold policy calculations which could care less if Chen got shot or not.  The men vote, contrary to conventional gender roles, were the emotional voter.  The swing was 17% for the youth vote which implies that the swing for young men was most likely well above 20%.  

[jaichind]

In India, all things equal, even though there are no scientific polling to verify this, women tend to vote for parties of the Right, like BJP while men tend to vote for parities of the center-left, like INC.   This is mostly because BJP is associated with Hindu religious movements and women in India are significantly more religious than men.   Although women tend to vote for populist parties that often promise various "free stuff" (like free lunch for kids at school etc etc).   Recently the best way to attract the women vote is to promise to ban liquor.  JD(U) did well in the recent Bihar assembly election in part by their promise to ban liquor in Bihar.  Liquor is often the main the reason for domestic violence in India. 

[jaichind]

I also read an interesting article about how women voted immediately after enfranchisement in the United States.  Rather than uniformly breaking for the Republican Party as one would expect, women tended to vote for the parties with more established institutions in their state, i.e. Northern women tended to vote more Republican than men but Southern women tended to vote more Democratic than men.

My understanding is that in 1920 the new women voters tended to vote the same way their husbands voted which resulted in a net wash in terms of impact.