The Social Roots of the Gender Gap in Political Participation: The Role of Situational and Cultural Constraints in Italy

The paper takes an innovative approach to the study of political participation by combining it with a gender studies perspective, investigating the role of structural and situational constraints in the highly gendered context of Italy. We test the role of 'Family arrangements' (the combination of marital status and number of children) and 'Domestic work' (hours spent in non-paid work) on the propensity to participating in political activities (institutional and non-institutional). 'Such constraints channel women’s time away from politics, but neither do they account for the whole difference, which calls for an additional explanation, identified with specific cultural constraints (which go back to processes of political socialization). As expected, there is a remarkable gap between women and men in traditional time-consuming political activities and situational constraints have a negative impact on women’s participation, and surprisingly also have a negative effect on men’s involvement.