“Gender Preference Gaps and Voting for Redistribution”, 2022-01-06 (; similar):
There is substantial evidence that women tend to support different policies and political candidates than men. Many studies also document gender differences in a variety of important preference dimensions, such as risk-taking, competition and pro-sociality. However, the degree to which differential voting by men and women is related to these gaps in more basic preferences requires an improved understanding.
We conduct an experiment in which individuals in small laboratory “societies” repeatedly vote for redistribution policies and engage in production.
We find that women vote for more egalitarian redistribution and that this difference persists with experience and in environments with varying degrees of risk. This gender voting gap is accounted for partly by both gender gaps in preferences and by expectations regarding economic circumstances. However, including both these controls in a regression analysis indicates that the latter is the primary driving force. We also observe policy differences between male-controlled and female-controlled groups, though these are substantially smaller than the mean individual differences—a natural consequence of the aggregation of individual preferences into collective outcomes.
…Our results demonstrate that while part of the persistent and substantial gender gap in voting for redistribution can be connected to underling gender preference gaps—primarily for less competition and more equality—the gender gap in relative performance beliefs is the most important underlying factor. Our work thus indicates that gender gaps in preferences may have some influence on behavior and policy outcomes as women’s participation in policymaking grows. However, our findings also suggest that this impact is secondary to that of beliefs about relative economic outcomes, which may change as women attain greater economic equality.