Are all politics masculine? Gender socialised personality traits and diversity in political engagement

Abstract

Most research studying gender and political participation fails to problematise the measure of gender identity. Using 2012/13 Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel survey data, we investigate how gender-socialised personality traits relate to various types of political engagement. Baseline models show that, when significant, self-assessed socialised agentic/masculine traits are positively, and communal/feminine traits are negatively, related to political engagement, though only to activist types of engagement. Multivariate analyses reveal the positive link between agentic/masculine traits and very agentic forms of activity, including engaging with political parties and politicians and going to public hearings. Furthermore, the categorial gender/sex gap in participation matters independently of agentic/masculine traits and communal/feminine traits but the direction and size of the gap differs depending on the type of engagement considered.