Labor Unrest , Ideology Formation and Female Participation in the 1930 s ú (original) (raw)

According to most of the available evidence, women were less likely to turn out than men when they got the right to vote. However, often these figures are based on simple comparisons of turnout rates between the pre and post female enfranchisement elections. Much less is known, however, about the root causes of female political participation upon formal electoral enfranchisement. We argue that ideological activation before female enfranchisement is key to understand the variation in the gender turnout gap. In places where women were exposed to ideologically-charged events they were as likely to turn out to vote as men. This pattern is analyzed by exploiting the post-WWI collapse of the heavily-feminized textile sector in Catalonia, that lead, in turn, to a wave of labour unrest prior the introduction of female su rage. We exploit a unique individual level data of o cial registers with individual voting roll-calls as well as other personal characteristics, such as age, address, gende...