Gender gaps in political attitudes revisited: the conditional influence of non-binary gender on left–right ideology and GAL-TAN opinions

Abstract

Across surveys and regardless of controls, women in many Western countries are consistently more politically left-leaning than men. More recently, however, innovative measures of non-binary gender identity suggest important heterogeneity in political attitudes within the categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’. Building from this, we study the direct and conditional associations between sex and non-binary gender on two political attitude dimensions: (1) left–right ideology; and (2) green/alternative/liberal versus traditionalist/authoritarian/nationalist opinions. Using a Swedish population-based survey from 2013, we find no evidence that political attitudes vary by non-binary gender identity alone, and only weak evidence that political attitudes vary by sex. However, supporting our conditional hypotheses, we find that gender (non)conformity matters significantly. Specifically, men with many masculine traits and women with many feminine traits stand more to the right and show more traditionalist/authoritarian/nationalist opinions than men and women who are less gender conforming.