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

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.