SNF Agora Associate Professor of Political Science Dawn Teele was just awarded $250,000 from the National Science Foundation to fund her research on the political geography of the gender gap. Her NSF project will investigate how women’s political participation and voting preferences evolved after women gained the right to vote in a number of countries, challenging the long-held scholarly view – and popular perception – that women were initially disengaged voters.
This project will collect detailed cross-national data from historical electoral records and will conduct in-depth analyses from countries such as Norway, Sweden, Argentina, and Australia, to understand how different electoral systems and political environments influenced women’s voting patterns. The project reveals that in many cases – especially in countries that used proportional electoral rules or where voting was compulsory — women turned out in higher numbers than men and were not always more conservative, providing a more nuanced understanding of women’s importance in early democratic elections.