Debunking the myth of a “Traditional” gender gap in the electoral support for Silvio Berlusconi in Italy (1994-2013)

Despite increasing gender realignment in voting behavior of most Western democracies, women are usually believed to have disproportionally supported Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing party in Italy. Using a pooled dataset based on six post-election surveys (one for each general election between 1994 and 2013), we find only spurious evidence for such a traditional gender gap in voting. Going beyond a mere “gender gap” approach, we then look for possible intra-gender differentiation. We find that housewives tend to present those attitudes - voting for the center-right, more leader-oriented -, which were traditionally imputed to “women”. Showing the importance of this “intra-gender occupational gap”, we conclude that heterogeneity among women should be taken more seriously by research that combines gender and electoral studies.