Explaining the Narrowing Gender Gap in Partisan Participation: Women’s Empowerment or Men’s Disengagement?

This article investigates the causes of decreasing gender gaps in grassroots party participation, asking which of multiple explanations for these changes seems best supported by patterns of behavioral change. We answer this question by examining longitudinal changes in survey reports about who is participating in party activities. Two sets of surveys using slightly different measures of activism consistently show that women comprise a growing share of active partisans, but they fail to support many common explanations about why such shifts are occurring, such as the argument that it is driven by generational changes. More surprisingly, they show that some of the closing of the participation gender gap reflects changes in men’s behavior more than women’s growing partisan empowerment, with men disproportionately withdrawing from party activism. These findings suggest that party efforts to (re)activate their grassroots might benefit from pursuing different engagement strategies for women and men supporters.