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Leaving home, finding a partner and having kids: Gender differences in political participation across the life course in Italy

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Abstract

This article analyzes how the political participation of men and women varies across the life course in Italy. Various studies on the topic have looked at the effects of the life cycle on political participation by using age as a proxy. Participation, however, may not be simply dependent on age. Instead, it may be related to the roles individuals assume during the life course. For this reason, the article looks at how participation changes during specific life transitions, such as leaving the parental home, forming a union and becoming a parent. Furthermore, the article puts special emphasis on how ‘private inequalities’ in the household may become ‘political inequalities’. In fact, family roles and responsibilities can be constraints to participation, especially for women. The article finds that while leaving the parental home is positively associated with participation for both men and women, forming a union and being a parent is detrimental to the participation of women, but not to that of men.

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Notes

  1. The respondents are selected between 18 and 80-year old.

  2. Van Deth (2014) excludes latent forms of participation from his definition. For a recent debate on the concept of political participation, see also Hooghe et al (2014).

  3. The items measure whether in the previous 12 months the respondent has engaged in each form of participation. Other items are not available.

  4. The ‘Not employed’ category comprises the unemployed, homemakers, the unable, those in other statuses.

  5. The survey does not include information on household or personal income.

  6. In a separate analysis the models were controlled for the use of paid domestic services and baby-sitting, available in fewer surveys. The coefficients on the key independent variable were not different from those presented here.

  7. The areas are built according to the NUTS1.

  8. Owing to space limitations, the comment of the control variables estimates is omitted.

  9. The birth cohorts are: ‘Before 1930’, ‘1931–1940’, ‘1941–1950’, ‘1951–1960’, ‘1961–1970’, ‘1971–1980’ and ‘After 1980’.

  10. These effects are indicated by the random-effects standard deviations.

  11. Unfortunately, the dependent variable does not include an indicator measuring voting turnout, as the survey lacks of such item. It could be possible, however, that the presence of turnout in the scale of participation might have had a ‘moderating’ effect on the differences across life stages and between men and women, given that voting is an ‘easier’ political act to do. In fact, voting turnout would ‘boost’ the number of respondents who engage at least in one action. Of course, without such an indicator this interpretation remains speculative. Future research should look at how voting turnout changes across life stages.

  12. The marginal effects are the differences in probability between the categories and the reference category, and are computed at the means of the variables using simulation (Gelman and Hill, 2006). To avoid presenting the marginal effects of the life-cycle stages on each point of the political participation scale, only four categories are shown to reduce the amount of discussion.

  13. The differences in probabilities are estimated at the means of the variables, using the same technique as for marginal effects.

  14. The oldest and the youngest cohorts are not shown for clarity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, LUISS ‘Guido Carli’, Via di Villa Emiliani 14, Rome, 00135, Italy

    Mario Quaranta

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Appendix

Appendix

Table A1

Table A1 Descriptive statistics
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Table A2

Table A2 Cross-classified binomial mixed models predicting political participation in Italy, with random slopes of the life-cycle stages across cohorts.
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Quaranta, M. Leaving home, finding a partner and having kids: Gender differences in political participation across the life course in Italy. Acta Polit 51, 372–397 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2015.19

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