International gender voting patterns

[Asian Nazi]

The general international pattern is that women vote to the left of men in developed countries with mature democratic institutions but vote to the right of them elsewhere.

http://ips.sagepub.com/content/21/4/441.full.pdf+html

[Asian Nazi]

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.

[Asian Nazi]

The general international pattern is that women vote to the left of men in developed countries with mature democratic institutions but vote to the right of them elsewhere.

http://ips.sagepub.com/content/21/4/441.full.pdf+html

In general I believe that this pattern derives from the economic role that women play in a society.  Societies where women are expected to place a primary value on family, household, and religion and where they are not active participants in a wage economy engender them to more conservative voting patterns.  This is as opposed to societies where women are expected to be wage earners, and their values and voting patterns change accordingly.

[Asian Nazi]

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.

Trying to find the journal article, but I have a terrible feeling it was in some archive I no longer have access to now that I'm no longer a student.  I cited it in a paper I wrote for a Women in Politics class I took a couple years ago.

IIRC the conclusion was that the only state women flipped in 1920 was Kentucky to the Democrats.

[Asian Nazi]

I don't think that this is the article, but its conclusions are similar:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1901657