The Feminization Strategy and the Electorate

Abstract

If the Conservative party was out of favour with much of the British electorate during the New Labour years, its failure to appeal to women was also much remarked upon. The Conservative party, long renowned for attracting the votes of women, found itself apparently struggling to attract them. In particular, and in common with other advanced democracies, the party experienced the effects of a new gender-generation gap, whereby younger women gradually shifted to the left of their male counterparts (Inglehart and Norris 2000; Norris 1999b). A strategy of feminization — of presenting the Conservative party as more descriptively representative in Parliament, as well as offering up more attractive policies for women — might be one means of garnering support from these lost women voters who had over the last decade or more turned their backs on the party. Such a strategy was, in our view, an integral part of David Cameron’s wider decontamination process that sought to replace the ‘nasty’ party image with one of ‘compassionate conservatism’.