The gender gap in online

political engagement
Simone Abendschön and Gema García-Albacete

General Online Research (GOR 2018), 28 February to 2 March

Suggested citation: Abendschön, S. and García-Albacete, G. 2018. “The Gender Gap in Online Political
Engagement.” General Online Research (GOR) Conference, Cologne.
Gender gap in political engagement

 Depends on forms of political participation (party politics vs. voting

or political consumerism)
 Large and partially unexplained gap in political interest, discussion
and knowledge in all Western democracies (i.e. Fraile & Gomez,
2017)
 Classical explanations: socialization, structural, situational (i.e. Burns,
Scholozman, Verba, 2001; Verge & Törmos 2012)

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
What happens online?

 Online environment as the “the great equalizer”

 Less time consuming
 Less complex, no need of social networks
 But mixed evidence depending on form of engagement and sample
type:
 no gap (Gil Zuñiga eta al 2014, Strandberg 2013) gap in specific
forms (Bode 2016; Vochocová & Mazak 2015) or a gap in online
political involvement in general (van Deth and Theocharis 2017)

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
General hypotheses

H1a. Online participation replicates the gender gap encountered on

traditional offline political participation

H1b. Online participation reduces the gender gap in political

participation as it lowers the costs involved in participating

H1c. Online participation enlarges the gender gap found in traditional

offline political participation as it increases the costs associated
with public exposure of opinions and interpersonal conflict

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
Online and offline political engagement

H2. Structural and situational explanations will have less explanatory

power for the gender gap in online engagement than in offline
engagement

Our proposal: The online environment impose additional limitations to

women’s political engagement in comparison to men’s: conflict,
public exposure, disagreement.

Personality as a mediating factor

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
Personality and online political engagement (BFI)
 Previous research on online political engagement:
 Being high in openness and extraversion should be linked
positively with online discussion
 Agreeableness should correlate negatively with expressive forms
of online engagement

 Regarding conscientiousness and emotional stability two

(contradicting) scenarios are plausible:
 We’d expect conscientiousness to be either not effective at all or
negatively correlated with online participation.
 A high emotional stability could be correlated both positively
and negatively with online discussion

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
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Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
Situational explanations: children

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
Situational explanations: occupation

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
Discussion

 The internet is not the ‘great equalizer’ regarding the gender gap in
political participation. There is still a gender gap in online political
participation (here online political discussion)

 As expected, many structural and situational factors are not as

effective in explaining the gender gap online as they are offline

 Personality plays an important role regarding online participation for

both sexes – imposing extra limitations for women regarding
agreeableness and extraversion

Gema García-Albacete
gemgarci@clio.uc3m.es
Thanks for your attention!