Recently, several Croatian media outlets touched upon the supposed ideological divergence of young women and men, popularizing the narrative that the former are increasingly liberal and the latter increasingly conservative. Thus, Jutarnji list describes this topic as an "ideological war between young men and women in their 20s," i.e., the ideological gap is interpreted as "a real social revolution with incalculable consequences," and RTL Direkt echoed the same perspective. This interpretation draws heavily from the work of Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2000; 2003), who coined the term 'modern gender gap'. They sought to explain the trend of women, starting from the late eighties and early nineties, aligning more with left-leaning ideological positions than men. This also signifies a reversal of the 'traditional gender gap', in which, in the fifties and sixties, women identified themselves more to the right than men.
Inglehart and Norris emphasize that the primary reasons for this change are the structural and value changes seen in post-industrial societies. These changes include the increased participation of women in paid labor, higher levels of education, the redefinition of gender-based roles and traditional family structures, secularization, the growth of post-materialist values, and various others. According to their interpretation, this modernization-induced change also has an important generational and socialization aspect. This is because younger generations of women are most exposed to the changes above, which is why such a context should primarily shape them (Shorrocks, 2018).
However, there are no studies in Croatia based on which we could get an insight into whether younger women, compared to their peers, have become more inclined to position themselves ideologically to the left. Of course, there are studies of political awareness and literacy, but they cover only a part of young people (primarily high school students) and do not rely on indicators that empirical political science most often uses to examine someone's ideological positioning. The latter also applies to sociological research on young people in Croatia, where their ideological stance is not operationalized. In most cases, some instances of their values are observed, but from which ideological identification cannot be reliably determined. For these purposes, a unidimensional measure of ideology is regularly used in surveys in the social sciences, whereby respondents position themselves on a scale from 1 (extreme left ideological stance) to 10 (extreme right ideological stance). Although this measurement manner has shortcomings, due to its wide use and simplicity, the left-right scale remains virtually the only empirical instrument that enables longitudinal and comparative comparisons of change and continuity in the ideological positioning of individuals (see Dassonneville, 2021). In addition, the validity of this scale has been confirmed by previous research conducted in Croatia (Raos, 2024; see Runje, Petrović and Bovan, 2020).
To determine if (a) there is a modern gender gap in ideological positioning in Croatia and (b) whether this gap is due to a recent ideological parting between young women and men, we will analyze longitudinal (cross-sectional) survey data from the Croatian Electoral Studies. These surveys cover the period from 1990 to 2020 and include a question about ideological positioning (the left-right index) in their questionnaires. Following the rest of the literature, we refer to gender differences as differences between female and male respondents, usually measured by a survey question about biological sex (M/F). We defined respondents who were between 18 and 29 years old at the time of the survey as young, which aligns with the categorizations from the related literature in Croatia and the sociology of youth (see Gvozdanović and Kovačić, 2020). This decision was partly caused by some specifics of the Croatian Electoral Studies survey questionnaires. More precisely, the first two surveys from this research series (1990 and 1992) did not record the individual ages of respondents but classified them into predetermined age categories. Thus, in 1990, the youngest category included individuals aged 18 to 27, and in 1992, individuals aged 18 to 28. In the end, this division resulted in a sample of 1,676 young men and 1,656 women (see Table 1 in the Appendix for a sample breakdown by survey year).
The graph in Figure 1 illustrates the mean ideological self-positioning of young men and women from 1990 to 2020. It is evident that during this period, young men positioned themselves (5.63) further to the right than women (5.40), and this difference is statistically significant (F=9.22, p=0.002). However, this is considered a relatively small effect (d=0.11). Overall, these results indicate that young women in Croatia tended to ideologically position themselves slightly to the left of their male counterparts in observed period. However, it is essential to note that this difference should not be exaggerated.
Figure 1. Ideological self-identification of young people (average of the 1990 to 2020 period)
Nevertheless, it is not clear yet whether the gender gap among young people has emerged due to the increasingly polarized relationship between gender and ideological identification in recent times. According to the popular belief, the ideological differences between girls and boys should be a relatively new phenomenon, meaning that the cleavage should have peaked only recently. To examine this, a simple linear regression was conducted using gender (1 for female, 0 for male), the survey year (period effect), and the interaction between the two as predictors. This setup enables a longitudinal insight into whether young women over time have become more inclined to identify themselves (more) to the left compared to their peers, while, for identification purposes, gender and the effect of time are also controlled for.
Figure 2 shows the results of the gender gap in the ideological self-identification of young women and men for each year of the survey, that is, the results of marginal interaction effects (the Appendix shows full regression results and marginal effects calculations in Tables 2 and 3. It is visible that in only two time points (1992 and 2015), young women ideologically positioned themselves to the left of men at a statistically significant level (values in which the confidence intervals do not intersect the red line with the source at zero on the y-axis). So, contrary to the popular narrative, we cannot talk about the recent deepening of the gender gap between men and women in ideological self-positioning. Apart from women being more positioned to the left in most cases (8/11 time points), detecting any longitudinal trends across the period is challenging. Eventually, we can talk about an (almost linear) reduction of the gender gap in ideological identification between 1992 and 2012.
Figure 2. Ideological self-identification of young women (contrasted to young men)
However, given that 2020 is the last point covered by Croatian Electoral Studies, we also checked the differences in the ideological identification of young women and men based on data from two recent surveys (ADMO, Jedro-Sustineo) from 2022. According to the results shown in Figure 3, it is evident that women ideologically position themselves more to the left, but this difference is not statistically significant in any case (F=0.56, p=0.45; F=1.12, p=0.29). Moreover, the differences of approximately 0.2 and 0.35 are far more minor than those in most other Western countries for 2022 (see The Economist).
Figure 3. Ideological self-identification of young people (2022 data, two surveys)
Finally, this does not mean there are no growing differences in some political attitudes between young women and men in Croatia. Although the left-right scale is a super-measure that, in most cases, summarizes individuals' political and economic attitudes well, this does not mean that it can capture all nuances and differences in various ideological issues. At the same time, because of situations in which extreme views on some issues are normalized (and/or mainstreamed), the possibility opens that individuals with such views declare themselves centrist (on a left-right scale), which would make the scale at least a partially dysfunctional instrument. Therefore, these results should not be interpreted as proof that there are no divergent attitudes of girls and boys regarding attitudes towards gender equality, feminism, or traditionalism. To examine the existence of such differences, longitudinal survey data are needed whose questionnaires would contain more specific sets of questions. Regardless, the analysis presented here indicates that, on average, young women tend to position themselves more ideologically to the left than young men. However, this difference does not stem from an increasing gender-based ideological gap, at least not when considering youth's ideological self-positioning.
References
Dassonneville, R. 2021. Change and continuity in the ideological gender gap a longitudinal analysis of left-right self-placement in OECD countries. European Journal of Political Research, 60(1): 225-238.
Gvozdanović, A. and Kovačić, M. 2020. Devedesete s odgođenim djelovanjem: jačanje tradicionalističkih vrijednosti među mladima u Hrvatskoj. In: Obad, O. i Bagarić, P. (eds.) Devedesete. Kratki rezovi (pp. 203-235). Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Jesenski i Turk.
Inglehart, R. and Norris, P. 2000. The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women’s and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective. International Political Science Review, 21(4): 441-463.
Inglehart, R. and Norris, P. 2003. Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Raos, V. 2024. Ideološka samoidentifikacija. In: Bovan, K., Raos, V. i Širinić, D. (eds.) Hrvatski birači – 30 godina političkog ponašanja i mišljenja (pp. 279-304). Zagreb: Fakultet političkih znanosti.
Runje, L., Petrović, V. and Bovan, K. (2020). Measuring Ideology in the Croatian Context: Testing the Left-Right Scale. Politička misao, 57(4): 123-151
Shorrocks, R. 2018. Cohort Change in Political Gender Gaps in Europe and Canada: The Role of Modernization. Politics & Society, 46(2): 135-175.
