The Gender Gap and the Welfare State

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What, if anything, happened after women got the right to vote? Most social scientists agree women won the vote stemmed thanks to strategic actions taken by women's movements, and that politicians' perceptions about how women would vote played a key role in reform. Yet the consequences of women's suffrage for electoral politics remain highly debated. Did they merely double the electorate in each constituency that supported each party, or did they vote differently than men? Did men, fearing women's votes would overwhelm them, respond to women's suffrage by mobilizing and retaliating? Scholarship from the United States finds that men and women tended to vote similarly, although women turned out at lower levels. What is curious about the lackluster conclusions in the US is that, at a higher level of relief, in both the US and Europe economists have found large fiscal effects emerging from suffrage reform. Scholarship on the welfare state has revealed changes in budgetary line items, including increases in health and sanitation expenditures, and enhanced social programming, and rising tariff rates, post suffrage. Set against the post mortem issued by political scientists who have studied the gender vote gap, the political economy effects of women’s enfranchisement cry out for explanation. In this spirit, this book searches for a political mechanism that links women’s suffrage to welfare state expansion and policy reform.