Challenging the Gender Gap in Political Interest

Abstract

Abstract Embedding randomized experiments in representative surveys of the Catalan population, this article shows that the survey instrument commonly used to measure citizens’ interest in politics is far from gender-neutral. By implicitly associating the political to male-oriented issues and male-dominated actors and domains, it artificially amplifies the gender gap, particularly by depressing women’s reported interest. The first experiment captures respondents’ interest through both the standard question about general political interest and a battery of specific political issues, randomizing question order. In the second experiment, an additional text helps reformulate the standard question by prompting respondents to think about politics in broader terms, randomizing the presentation of male-oriented and female-oriented political issues to test the effect of cognitive accessibility and recency. By expanding the conceptualization of the political, the priming applied in our experiments completely closes the gender gap, thereby casting doubt on the validity of the traditional survey instrument.