The lefter sex

IF WOMEN’S votes had not counted (as was the case until 1918), Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate, would have won a landslide victory in Austria’s presidential election on May 22nd. According to exit polls, 60% of men supported him. But female voters favoured the Green Party candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, by a similar margin. The ladies’ affections proved more valuable than the men’s: Mr Van der Bellen won by a sliver, 50.3% to 49.7%.

In many countries women are more likely than men to lean left, and the gap may be widening. In America, Barack Obama had a 12-point margin among female voters in 2012, but lost men to Mitt Romney by eight. This year 60% of women view Donald Trump unfavourably; only 48% feel that way about Hillary Clinton.

It was not always thus. In Europe, women were long seen as bastions of conservatism. In particular, Christian Democrat and Catholic parties benefited from the support of devout female voters. (Women are slightly more likely to be religious than men.) In 1968 the Christian Democrats won more than 50% of the female vote in Italy but less than 30% of the men. Research shows that in six European countries—Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and West Germany—female voters skewed conservative in the early 1970s by between two and 14 percentage points.

This began to reverse in the 1980s and 1990s, according to a paper published in 2000 by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, two political scientists. In Austria, Ireland, Switzerland and most of Scandinavia, female voters moved to the left. This may have been the result of a decline in religious belief; the shift of women into the workforce, where they found themselves in low-paid jobs; and the rise of feminist issues such as abortion. Women were also less hawkish than men on defence, and more concerned about social equality and the environment.

European women have not swung all the way to the far left; they have mostly drifted to the centre. Mattia Forni of Ipsos Mori, a polling group, says that female voters tend to vote for reassuring politicians, rather than disruptive or insurgent leaders. In Italy the 2013 election saw the surge of the left-wing Five Star Movement, led by Beppe Grillo, a fiery and unpredictable eurosceptic comedian. He got more votes from men (29%) than from women (22%). By contrast, the more mainstream Matteo Renzi of the centre-left Democratic Party did somewhat better with the ladies.

Women’s moderation shows up on the right, too. In a recent German opinion poll for Ipsos Mori, 35% of female voters favoured the centre-right Christian Democrat party of that model of motherly reassurance, Angela Merkel; male support was 31%. Only 12% of German women backed the far-right AfD party, against 16% of men.

An exception is France, where Marine Le Pen has closed most of the gap between the sexes’ willingness to vote for her far-right National Front. She has done so by cultivating a more mainstream image and shedding some of the party’s thuggish associations. When her irascible father, Jean-Marie, led the party, its vote was heavily male. But in 2012 Ms Le Pen scored almost as highly among women (17%) as among men (19%).

Women are not monolithic. The young and the old often differ: Austrian women under 29 favoured Mr Van der Bellen by more than 30 percentage points, while those aged over 60 preferred him by only ten. In the 2015 British election, the Labour Party enjoyed a plurality in every female age group under 55. In the 18-24 age range, women backed Labour over Conservatives by 44% to 24%. But women aged over 55 (a much bigger group) backed the Tories over Labour, by 45% to 27%. When the figures were aggregated, the Conservatives had a four-point lead among women and an eight-point lead among men.

Mr Inglehart and Ms Norris expect that in the long term women’s leftward political skew will only increase, as conservative older voters die and are replaced by more progressive young ones. But will it? Both men and women tend to become more conservative as they grow older. This could be for economic reasons: as people become richer they are more likely to resent high taxes. Or it could be for psychological or cultural reasons: as they age, people grow more set in their ways and resistant to social change.

But that is an issue for the long term. In the meantime, women may be Europe’s best defence against the far right.