All in this together? Austerity and the gender-age gap in the 2015 and 2017 British general elections

Abstract

The 2010–2015 Conservative-led Coalition’s austerity policies hit women financially harder than men. However, contrary to expectations at the time, the Conservatives still gained more support from women than men on average in the 2015 general election. We examine the impact of austerity on vote choice in the 2015 and 2017 general elections through analysis of Labour and Conservative economic policy in conjunction with data from the British Election Study’s face-to-face post-election surveys. The expectation that women should be particularly anti-austerity and thus less supportive of the Conservative Party does hold for younger women, who were especially pessimistic relative to their male peers and older age groups about their living costs, household finances, the economy, and the National Health Service in both elections. However, this does not hold for older women, who were protected by the Coalition’s policies on pensions and were more similar to men in their assessment of their economic situation.

Keywords

austerity gender gaps vote choice

Introduction

The 2010 general election in Britain saw a new Conservative-led Coalition take office. Faced with ‘the worst global financial crisis for generations’ (HM Treasury, 2009), the government sought to reduce the deficit through austerity measures that strongly relied on cuts to public expenditure rather than tax increases. As a result, austerity measures have hit women financially harder than men (Busby and James, 2016), since they are more likely than men to receive government assistance and use public services (MacLeavy, 2011; Women’s Budget Group, 2016). In 2015, this led to expectations that the Conservative Party would fail to garner enough support from women voters at the general election (Annesley and Gains, 2014; Bryson, 2012; Campbell and Childs, 2015b).

Contrary to these expectations, British Election Study (BES) (Fieldhouse et al., 2016) data show that the Conservatives retained a modest lead among women voters compared with male voters on average at the 2015 election.¹ At first glance, then, it seems that austerity policies had little negative effect on women’s Conservative support. However, we argue in this article that the gendered impact of austerity differed by life-stage, and thus focusing on the difference between all men and all women may underestimate gender differences in vote choice.

Our research question is: Has the impact of austerity policies contributed towards gender differences in voting behaviour in Britain? We seek to answer this question by examining Labour and Conservative economic policy proposals in 2015 and 2017, in conjunction with data from the BES’s face-to-face post-election surveys for the same elections. Both elections were fought against a backdrop of austerity, but with different party leaders and centred on different issues. Our examination of economic policy assesses the likely gendered impact of the policies being offered by the parties, while the BES analysis tests whether gender differences in economic concerns were associated with gender differences in vote choice. We argue that (anti-)austerity policies were particularly influential for Labour support among younger women, while older women were comparatively protected from austerity through pension policies and thus were more inclined to vote Conservative.

Our focus on the consequences of economic policy for gender vote gaps presents a significant contribution to the literature on gender gaps and electoral behaviour. While a wide body of research highlights the importance of economic policy on voting behaviour (Downs, 1957; Fiorina, 1981; Hobolt and Karp, 2010; Key, 1966), little attention has been devoted to the impact of policy on gender differences in vote choice. Studies of gender vote gaps rarely, if ever, examine the role of party policy in creating gender gaps. We argue that examining the electoral context and choices available to the electorate can shed light on the presence or absence of gender differences in voting behaviour. We examine the connection between party policy and gendered voting behaviour here in the British case, but studies beyond Britain and comparatively should explore party policy positions further as a source of gender differences in vote choice.

Moreover, we draw attention to the electoral consequences of austerity. In the European context, the impact of austerity has been gendered (Karamessini and Rubery, 2013). Reductions in women’s entitlements have been widespread; for instance, in Ireland and Denmark, Child Benefit has been reduced, and in Romania and Macedonia, maternity leave benefits have been cut (European Women’s Lobby, 2012: 9–10). Yet, little is known about the impact of such policies on women’s party support. The importance of austerity policies for voting behaviour has implications for party support at future elections and raises the possibility of a backlash against such policies.

We begin below by discussing the extant literature on gendered voting behaviour, with a focus on the context of austerity. Subsequently, we conduct a manifesto analysis for Labour and the Conservatives in 2015 and 2017, generating expectations for gendered vote choice patterns. We then test these expectations using the BES. Finally, we discuss our main findings alongside the wider implications of our research.

Gender, austerity and vote choice

Existing literature on gender vote gaps in Western democracies largely emphasises socioeconomic factors. Scholars such as Inglehart and Norris (2000, 2003) argue that, as a result of socioeconomic change, younger women lean towards left-wing parties, whereas older women are more likely to support parties on the right. Older women’s greater religiosity is thought to be partly responsible for this trend (Emmenegger and Manow 2014; Shorrocks, 2018). Younger women’s shift to the left has been linked to developments such as declining marriage, increasing labour force participation, and rising education rates. Evidence of ideological similarity between spouses (Jennings and Stoker, 2005) means declining marriage rates imply gender divergence. Single women also have lower household incomes than married women, making them more supportive of the left (Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2004; Edlund and Pande, 2002). Moreover, it is argued that paid employment exposes women to gender inequalities related to childcare or unequal pay, which shape their political preferences (Manza and Brooks, 1998). Increased educational opportunities are also believed to contribute towards younger women’s left-wing views, as this leads women to become more economically independent (Giger, 2009; Inglehart and Norris, 2000, 2003; Iversen and Rosenbluth, 2006).

However, socioeconomic factors, although a compelling explanation for change in the gender vote gap over time, cannot account for fluctuations in gender vote gaps across elections. Factors such as increased labour force participation and education rates also tend to have little explanatory power for gender vote gaps in comparative research (Giger, 2009; Shorrocks, 2018). Furthermore, in analysis conducted prior to 2015, there was little evidence that younger women were indeed more left-wing than younger men in the British context (Campbell, 2006; Shorrocks, 2016). For these reasons, we argue that we should go beyond socioeconomic explanations of gender vote gaps and examine the electoral and policy context within which men and women make their electoral choices. We now turn to the case of austerity in Britain, a policy with gendered implications.

A wide body of research has consistently demonstrated the gendered burden of austerity in Britain (MacLeavy, 2011; Women’s Budget Group, 2016). Taking every specific change to direct taxes and benefits since 2010, analysis from the House of Commons Library found that between 2010 and 2013, 79% of budget cuts were borne by women compared with 21% by men (Busby and James, 2016). This impact of austerity on women has varied by life-stage. Women in the younger stages of the life-cycle, who are more likely to be working than older women and to have childcare responsibilities, appeared to bear the brunt of public spending reductions. The Women’s Budget Group (2016) estimated that lone parent families – 92% of which are headed by women – witnessed the greatest reduction in disposable income due to tax and benefit changes, including the freezing of Child Benefit (of which women comprise 98% of recipients) (Campbell, 2010), reductions in Working Tax Credit from 80% to 70%, and the tapering of Child Benefit paid to individuals with a family earning over £50,000 per year.

Meanwhile, benefits for pensioners were largely protected and, in some cases, increased (McKay and Rowlingson, 2016). The ‘triple lock’ on pensions, meaning the basic state pension would increase by average earnings, inflation, or 2.5%, whichever is highest, was implemented in 2011 and saw the value of the state pension increase significantly. Between 2010 and 2016, the value of the state pension increased by 22.2%, compared with growth in earnings of 7.6% and growth in prices of 12.3% over the same period (House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, 2016). Often poorer than their male counterparts in later life, women pensioners are more likely than men to rely on the basic state pension as a source of income (Price, 2008; Price et al., 2016; Rummery, 2016).

The impact of policies enacted in the 2010–2017 period thus had a gendered effect, but in a way that varies across the life-cycle. This was the broad context within which voters made their choices in 2015 and 2017. We now turn to an analysis of the party manifestos at both elections to understand the specific choices put before voters in these elections. If voters were not faced with relevant and distinct choices between the parties, we would not necessarily expect the gendered impact of austerity to translate into gender differences in vote choice.

Manifesto analysis

We analyse the economic policy pledges made by the Conservatives and Labour to the electorate in the 2015 and 2017 elections. Manifestos are an effective way to map parties’ shifting ideological positions and policy agendas (Allen and Bara, 2017), and have been used as a method of analysis in gender scholarship elsewhere (Campbell and Childs, 2010, 2015a). We analyse both the Conservative and Labour manifestos, as these were the two main parties at the 2015 and 2017 general elections. In doing so, we focus on social security, taxation, and pensions, three areas where gender is particularly relevant. We summarise these policies below, and use them to guide our expectations for gender differences in vote choice.

The 2015 general election

Despite a nascent recovery in the economy since 2010, the budget deficit remained at the forefront of political debate at the 2015 election. Both Labour and the Conservatives offered fiscal policy agendas designed to address the deficit. The Conservatives predominantly relied on spending cuts, while Labour sought to achieve balance in current spending, and borrowing to finance investment (Gamble, 2015).

As part of its ‘long-term economic plan’, the Conservatives promised to reduce government spending and run a small budget surplus by 2018/2019. Crucially, the party pledged to reduce social security spending by £12 billion by 2017/2018, with approximately £1.3 billion of these savings delivered through reductions to working-age benefits. Labour also proposed some spending cuts to social security, but to a lesser extent. Notably, Labour made a series of anti-austerity pledges designed to dismantle measures implemented under the Coalition government. This included the abolition of the Social Sector Size Criteria (‘the bedroom tax’), and a promise to review Universal Credit – a single monthly payment combining six means-tested benefits and tax credits – both policies which had been deleterious to working-age women who are more likely to rely on such benefits. Universal Credit, a ‘flagship’ Coalition policy (Sainsbury, 2014), garnered criticism among gender equality advocates because the payment would be made to one person in a household, putting women at greater risk of financial abuse (Women’s Budget Group, 2018). Taken together, we would expect Labour’s anti-austerity policies to be particularly attractive to employed women and women with caring responsibilities – in other words, women at earlier life-stages – since it is this group who are most reliant on transfer payments (Women’s Budget Group, 2010).

As shown in Table 1, the ‘mansion tax’ was one of several commitments to tax increases from the Labour Party. Conversely, the Conservatives focused on tax cuts through increasing the personal tax allowance and the Income Tax threshold. Tax cuts are more likely to benefit men, since they comprise the majority of higher earners. Rises in the personal tax allowance do not benefit those already below it, 66% of whom are women (Women’s Budget Group, 2017). By contrast, of those expected to benefit from the increase in the Income Tax threshold, 73% would be men (Women’s Budget Group, 2017). Thus, we would expect Conservative support to be bolstered among working-age men who are more likely to gain financially from lower taxation.

Table 1.

Key economic policies at the 2015 general election.

Policy areas	Conservatives	Labour	Expectations
Social security	– Lower the benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000 – Freeze working-age benefits for 2 years – End housing benefit for 18- to 21-year-olds on JSA – Roll out Universal Credit	– Freeze Child Benefit rises for 2 years – Protect spending on tax credits – Abolish the ‘bedroom tax’ – Review Universal Credit	Higher Labour support among working-age women
Taxation and earnings	– Increase 40p tax threshold to £50,000 – Raise personal tax allowance to £12,500 – Reduce tax relief on pension contributions for people earning over £50,000 – Raise the minimum wage – Recognise marriage in the tax system	– Return to the 50p tax rate for higher earners – Reintroduce a lower 10p starting rate of tax – Reduce pension tax relief for higher earners – ‘Mansion tax’ on property worth over £2 million – Raise the minimum wage – Abolish the recognition of marriage in the tax system	Higher Conservative support among working-age men
Pensions and pensioner benefits	– Retain the ‘triple lock’ – Maintain all pensioner benefits – Extend pension freedoms – Cap social care costs	– Retain the ‘triple lock’ – Maintain some pensioner benefits – Extend pension freedoms	Higher Conservative support among older voters – particularly women

JSA: Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Crucially in 2015, a large proportion of Conservative spending commitments would benefit older generations, such as pledges to maintain all pensioner benefits (upon which older women are more reliant), including the Winter Fuel Allowance, free bus passes, free TV licences, and a cap on the cost of social care. In addition, the party remained committed to retaining the ‘triple lock’ on pensions (a policy also supported by Labour). The Conservatives also pledged to continue Coalition policy of relaxing pension regulations, including scrapping the requirement to purchase an annuity – a policy that would be particularly attractive to older women pensioners since they previously had to buy annuities at higher rates than men (Curry and O’Connell, 2004).

The 2017 general election

By 2017, Britain’s political landscape had shifted considerably, with the issue of Brexit dominating the political agenda. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership shifted further left on a range of economic issues – a development which interestingly somewhat reversed the parties’ positions in relation to older voters. The Conservatives offered fewer policies to secure their core base of older voters than in 2015, while Labour offered a range of economic commitments – including those to older voters – that the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) deemed would raise public spending to its highest level since the mid-1980s (Inman, 2017) (Table 2).

Table 2.

Key economic policies at the 2017 general election.

Policy areas	Conservatives	Labour	Expectations
Social security	– Continue the roll-out of Universal Credit	– Abolish the ‘bedroom tax’ – Abolish the two-child policy on Child Tax Credits – End 6-week delays in Universal Credit payments – Reinstate housing benefit for 18- to 21-year-olds	Higher Labour support among working-age women
Taxation and earnings	– Raise higher rate tax threshold to £50,000 – Raise personal tax allowance to £12,500 – Increase the National Living Wage	– Introduce a £45,000 rate on income tax for those earning over £80,000 p/a – 50% tax on those earning over £123,000 p/a – Raise the minimum wage	Higher Conservative support among working-age men
Pensions and pensioner benefits	– Introduce a ‘double lock’ from 2020 – Means test Winter Fuel Allowance – Raise cost of care threshold to £100,000	– Retain ‘triple lock’ – Maintain universality of pensioner benefits – Increase pension credit for women affected by the change in State Pension Age	Reduced Conservative support among older voters – particularly women

The apparent reversal between the Conservatives and Labour in their commitments to older voters was reflected in several policy proposals. The Conservatives proposed to means-test Winter Fuel Payments, while Labour pledged to maintain their universality. Labour pledged to retain the ‘triple lock’, while the Conservatives proposed to replace it with a ‘double lock’ from 2020. Most notable was the Conservative proposal on social care funding, which emerged as a key issue in the 2017 campaign. Dubbed by its critics as the ‘dementia tax’, the policy proposed that elderly people would be required to pay the full amount for social care (both domiciliary and residential) until their assets and savings were reduced to £100,000. Criticism of the policy led to a U-turn by Theresa May, who later announced that a Conservative government would introduce a cap on care costs (Bale and Webb, 2017; Hughes, 2017). The impact of this policy (despite the U-turn), alongside proposed reductions in pensioner benefits, would lead us to expect a reduced Conservative lead among older voters – particularly older women as those most reliant on state support. Importantly, though, the context of Brexit in 2017 realigned the electorate along generational lines. The Conservative’s promise of a hard Brexit at the 2017 election was especially attractive to older voters, who were more likely to have voted Leave, while Labour’s softer stance on Brexit appeared to carry weight with voters of younger generations (Heath and Goodwin, 2017). In this context, despite the Conservative Party’s economic policies appearing less attractive to older voters in 2017 compared with 2015, we nevertheless expect higher support among older voters for the Conservative Party in 2017 in line with other studies.

In 2017, the Conservative manifesto contained relatively little on social security, indicating a continuation of current austerity policies in this realm. This contrasts with Labour’s proposals for a series of reforms to Conservative family welfare policies – indicative of its shift to an ‘anti-austerity platform’ under Jeremy Corbyn (Heath and Goodwin, 2017: 346). This included abolishing the two-child policy on Child Tax Credit (labelled by critics as the ‘rape clause’, which limits payments to two children unless a woman can prove her third child is a result of rape), and ending 6-week delays in Universal Credit payments (which the Conservatives stated they would continue to roll-out). These measures lead us to expect higher support among women – particularly younger women who had been hit hardest by austerity measures – for Labour.

Turning to the issue of taxes, the Conservatives pledged to continue to raise the higher rate tax threshold to £50,000 and the personal allowance to £12,500. While Labour proposed no changes to basic and higher income tax rates, it did propose more progressive tax policies than in 2015 with a 45% rate on income tax for those earning over £80,000 a year, and a 50% tax on those earning over £123,000 a year. Similarly to 2015, we would expect Conservative tax policies to be particularly attractive to working-age men in particular, since they comprise the majority of higher earners.

To summarise the manifesto analysis, then, Labour and the Conservatives broadly offered differing economic policies to voters in 2015 and 2017. At both elections, Labour’s positions would be more beneficial for working-age women than the Conservative’s. Working-age men, especially without dependents, would gain more from the Conservative’s policies than from Labour’s. In 2015, Conservative policy would have particularly benefitted women at older life-stages compared with Labour’s, especially those drawing a state pension. By 2017, there was less difference in how Conservative and Labour policy would impact older voters, with Labour’s policies becoming more generous to those in more advanced life-stages than in 2015. This manifesto analysis, and what we know about the gendered impact of austerity, lead us to the following hypotheses:

H1. Younger women will be more pessimistic about their economic and financial situation than men or older women.

H2A. Younger women will be more supportive of Labour and less supportive of the Conservatives relative to younger men.

H2B. This gender difference will be associated with gender differences in economic and financial pessimism.

H3A. Older women will be more supportive of the Conservatives and less supportive of Labour relative to younger women.

H3B. This age difference for women will be associated with age differences in economic and financial pessimism.

Vote choice analysis

In this section, we use cross-sectional data from the British Election Studies (BES) in 2015 and 2017 (Fieldhouse et al., 2016, 2018) to test the hypotheses. The BES provides ideal data because they provide face-to-face surveys of nationally representative probability samples in the immediate aftermath of each election, asking identical questions. Our strategy in this section is first to examine whether men and women of different life-stages differ in their evaluations of their own economic situation as well as the national economy, and then to examine whether such attitudes are associated with gender differences in vote choice.

Our key dependent variable is retrospective vote choice: Conservative, Labour, and Other. We focus here on Labour and Conservative support as the two dominant parties, and because there are too few voters for other parties in the survey to sensibly examine them by gender and life-stage. Economic and financial pessimism is measured using individual perceptions of living costs, the household financial situation, the national economic situation, and the National Health Service (NHS). We refer to these collectively as ‘economic/financial pessimism’. Each variable has three categories, indicating whether the individual thought the situation had got/will get worse, stayed/will stay the same, or had got/will get better. The period of reference is the last election (2010 or 2015) for the questions on the NHS and living costs, and 12 months for questions on the household financial or national economic situation. Retrospective questions are asked for all indicators; prospective ones just for the household financial and national economic situation. Full question wordings for these variables can be found in the supplemental material. The original questions contain five categories, and respondents could differentiate between ‘a little worse’ and ‘a lot worse’, and ‘a little better’ and ‘a lot better’. A very small number of respondents thought that things had got either a little or a lot better, especially in 2017; therefore, we collapsed these categories.

We examine the relationship between economic/financial pessimism and vote choice via a series of multinomial logistic regression models for each election. The 2015 and 2017 elections took place in very different contexts. The 2016 European Union (EU) referendum vote was a seismic moment in British politics, and voters’ positions on the issue were crucial to understanding the 2017 election (Heath and Goodwin, 2017; Mellon et al., 2018) – but not the one in 2015. Moreover, almost all political parties were led by a different leader in 2017 compared with 2015 and had experienced a corresponding change in policy direction, especially Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. We thus run the analysis separately for both elections. The first multinomial model includes just gender and its interaction with life-stage. Gender is a dichotomous variable for being a woman. Life-stage is operationalised through respondent’s age, which is coded into three categories: less than 35, 35–64, and 65+. Our selection of age 35 as the cut-off for the youngest age group is consistent with other demographic studies that label 18–34 as ‘young adults’ (Payne, 2016; Vespa, 2017). We designate 65 and over as the oldest life-stage, as this is the State Pension Age applying to both men and women in our sample.

The second model controls for other explanations of gender differences in vote choice, especially those that have been associated with different gender vote gaps at different ages. Education has six categories: none, General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) or equivalent, A-Level or equivalent, post A-level vocational, Degree, and other. Employment is a dichotomous variable for being in employment or not. Religiosity has five categories: no religion, Protestant, Catholic, Other Christian, and Other non-Christian. Marital status has six categories: married, living with a partner, separated, divorced, widowed, and single (never married). Social class (self-reported) has three categories: middle class, working class, and other. Trade union membership is a dichotomous variable for being a trade union member. We are thus controlling for other explanations for why younger women might be more supportive of Labour apart from our hypothesised mechanisms relating to the electoral context and party policy.

This model also includes controls for factors known to be relevant for British elections. We control for hypothetical EU referendum vote in 2015 and retrospective referendum vote in 2017. These variables have three categories: wouldn’t vote or don’t know (2015)/didn’t vote (2017) (reference), Leave, and Remain. Although EU opinion was not as salient in 2015 as in 2017, we control for this in both years to keep the models consistent. We also control for left-right and liberal-authoritarian positions, to account for the possibility that younger women are more left-wing because of the values they hold rather than because of their economic situation under austerity. Left-right position and liberal-authoritarian position are each constructed out of responses to four items on a 5-point strongly disagree to strongly agree scale. Full wordings for these items are in the supplemental material. This strategy presents a tough test for H2B and H3B, as we are expecting to find an effect of economic/financial pessimism over and above that of control variables that are themselves likely related to being pessimistic (such as marital status, social class). Moreover, respondents could hold left-right values because of their economic/financial pessimism.

The third model adds measures for economic/financial pessimism. Our discussion of the literature and the context of austerity in Britain suggests that there will be gender differences in vote choice within particular life-stages (H2A/H2B). However, we also expect women of different life-stages to differ from each other (H3A/H3B). Our strategy is thus to examine how gender vote gaps within age groups, and age differences within genders, alter once these economic/financial pessimism variables have been added. If they substantially reduce in size or become statistically insignificant compared with model 2, this provides evidence that such pessimism is relevant for gender gaps by life-stage in vote choice in Britain. This is a strategy often employed in studies of gender vote gaps (see Campbell, 2006; Giger, 2009). All models are run on the sub-sample of respondents who answered all relevant questions: N = 1650 in 2015 and 1258 in 2017. Summary statistics for all variables can be found in Supplemental Table A1. All analysis is weighted according to the recommended weights in the BES.

Gender and economic/financial pessimism

Figures 1 and 2 show men and women’s opinions towards living costs, their financial situation, the economic situation, and the NHS in 2015 and 2017. In 2015, around 50% of respondents thought that the NHS and living costs had got worse since the last election. Respondents were more positive about their household finances and the general economic situation, with about 30% of respondents thinking these had got worse in the past 12 months and were going to get worse in the next 12 months. By 2017, around 60%–70% of respondents thought that living costs and the NHS had got worse since the last election, and a similar percentage thought that the general economic situation had got worse and was going to get worse. Very few respondents in 2017 thought that any of the areas asked about had improved or would improve. Respondents thus became markedly more pessimistic in the 2 years between 2015 and 2017, and the shift in opinion likely reflects concerns about the UK economy post-Brexit, in addition to continued austerity.

In both elections and for all indicators, women were more pessimistic than men. The gender differences in terms of thinking the situation had got or would get worse are mostly between 5 and 10 percentage points. Men were also more likely to respond that things had improved or would improve in the future.

Our discussion of the Coalition/Conservative government’s policies in the period 2010–2017 suggests that their impact should differ by gender and life-stage. Table 3 shows the percentage of men and women agreeing with the statements by life-stage in 2015. In line with H1, the table shows that women under 35 were consistently more likely than men of the same age group to think that the situation had got or would get worse, usually by about 10–15 percentage points. In addition, in almost all cases they are the most pessimistic of all six gender-by-age groups, with the exception of the issue of the NHS. Women aged 35–64 also tend to be more pessimistic than men of their age group, although this is less consistent. Older women (65+), however, are no more pessimistic than older men, and the oldest age group are generally the least pessimistic. Because younger women were particularly pessimistic, the difference between age groups tends to be larger for women than men.

Table 3.

Economic/financial pessimism by gender and age in 2015.

		Living costs			Household financial situation (retrospective)			General economic situation (retrospective)
		Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better
<35	F	72	21	6	35	43	23	39	30	31
	M	62	21	18	23	45	32	25	33	42
35–64	F	59	21	20	33	44	23	32	31	37
	M	55	26	20	30	45	24	24	35	41
65+	F	42	34	24	17	70	13	27	35	38
	M	39	33	28	19	60	21	22	29	48
		Household financial situation (prospective)			General economic situation (prospective)			NHS
		Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better
<35	F	30	38	32	36	30	34	54	33	13
	M	19	34	47	27	29	44	53	34	13
35–64	F	25	50	25	30	33	36	60	31	10
	M	25	46	29	25	30	44	52	37	12
65+	F	20	69	12	26	31	43	49	32	19
	M	17	66	17	21	26	52	47	39	14

NHS: National Health Service.

Numbers are percentages.

Source: BES (2015).

By 2017 (Table 4), economic/financial pessimism has risen among all groups. It is striking how few respondents in 2017 were optimistic about any of the issues. While younger age groups still tend to be the most pessimistic, this becomes less stark with a majority of all six gender-by-age groups agreeing that living costs, the general economic situation, and the NHS had got worse since the last election. H1 is again supported. Women under the age of 35 are still the most pessimistic group and are more pessimistic than men of the same age. This difference tends to be between 5 and 15 percentage points, but women under 35 are 22 percentage points more likely than younger men to say that they think the economic situation will get worse over the next 12 months.

Table 4.

Economic/financial pessimism by gender and age in 2017.

		Living costs			Household financial situation (retrospective)			General economic situation (retrospective)
		Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better
<35	F	74	23	2	40	40	20	65	31	4
	M	68	29	4	28	50	23	59	23	18
35–64	F	73	20	6	41	46	13	69	27	5
	M	67	30	4	42	41	17	61	28	11
65+	F	65	32	3	30	65	5	58	36	6
	M	61	35	4	31	59	10	56	32	12
		Household financial situation (prospective)			General economic situation (prospective)			NHS
		Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better	Worse	Same	Better
<35	F	37	41	22	70	21	9	70	24	6
	M	24	44	32	47	30	23	56	36	8
35–64	F	40	47	13	64	26	10	66	27	7
	M	37	43	19	60	26	14	55	40	4
65+	F	39	55	6	56	25	19	56	37	9
	M	37	55	8	60	22	18	54	39	6

NHS: National Health Service.

Numbers are percentages.

Source: BES (2017).

Gender and vote choice

Tables 5 and 6 show the results of the multinomial logit models, which predict vote choice, for the key variables of gender and age group. The full results are in Supplemental Tables A2 and A3. Model 1 includes just gender and its interaction with age group; model 2 adds the control variables; and model 3 adds the economic/financial pessimism indicators. The coefficients of interest are those for the main effect of gender (the gender difference for those under 35), the main effect of age (the effect of age for men), and the interaction terms, which show if the age effects are different for men and women. To aid interpretation of the interaction terms, Figure 3 shows the results in terms of the predicted gender difference in vote choice within each age group in 2015 and 2017, and Figures 4 and 5 show the results in terms of the predicted age differences in vote choice for men and women, for the Conservatives and Labour, respectively. This enables us to examine whether economic/financial pessimism is associated with gender differences in vote choice within age groups, and age differences in vote choice separately for both men and women.

Table 5.

Multinomial logit models for 2015 vote choice (N = 1650).

	Labour vs Conservatives			Other vs Conservatives
	Model 1	Model 2 (controls)	Model 3 (economic/financial pessimism)	Model 1	Model 2 (controls)	Model 3 (economic/financial pessimism)
Female	0.633*	0.695*	0.472	0.147	0.201	0.012
	(0.250)	(0.285)	(0.306)	(0.290)	(0.311)	(0.324)
Age
35–64	−0.313	0.165	0.249	−0.003	0.231	0.273
	(0.207)	(0.261)	(0.279)	(0.225)	(0.269)	(0.280)
65+	−0.818**	−0.494	−0.180	−0.116	0.041	0.150
	(0.247)	(0.355)	(0.381)	(0.250)	(0.344)	(0.362)
Female*35–64	−0.788**	−0.919**	−0.853*	−0.443	−0.501	−0.410
	(0.298)	(0.341)	(0.363)	(0.336)	(0.361)	(0.374)
Female*65+	−0.737*	−0.805*	−0.743	−0.769*	−0.723	−0.588
	(0.346)	(0.402)	(0.429)	(0.374)	(0.407)	(0.421)

Coefficients are log odds, and standard errors in parentheses. Positive coefficients indicate that respondents are more supportive of Labour/Other than the Conservatives.

(* indicates the interaction between gender and age group)

p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.

Table 6.

Multinomial logit models for 2017 vote choice (N = 1258).

	Labour vs Conservatives			Other vs Conservatives
	Model 1	Model 2 (controls)	Model 3 (economic/financial pessimism)	Model 1	Model 2 (controls)	Model 3 (economic/financial pessimism)
Female	0.804*	0.825*	0.470	0.501	0.444	0.246
	(0.336)	(0.369)	(0.393)	(0.461)	(0.478)	(0.492)
Age
35–64	−0.272	−0.167	−0.154	0.147	0.559	0.533
	(0.247)	(0.299)	(0.328)	(0.336)	(0.376)	(0.396)
65+	−1.321**	−1.002**	−1.021*	−0.832*	−0.375	−0.320
	(0.273)	(0.380)	(0.419)	(0.375)	(0.474)	(0.498)
Female*35–64	−0.833*	−0.676	−0.459	−0.546	−0.441	−0.341
	(0.384)	(0.425)	(0.453)	(0.517)	(0.537)	(0.552)
Female*65+	−0.764	−0.582	−0.192	−0.695	−0.495	−0.352
	(0.427)	(0.472)	(0.506)	(0.591)	(0.614)	(0.630)

Coefficients are log odds, and standard errors in parentheses. Positive coefficients indicate that respondents are more supportive of Labour/Other than the Conservatives.

(* indicates the interaction between gender and age group)

p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.

Model 1 shows that there are gender differences in vote choice by life-stage in both election years. Men under 35 years were less likely to vote Labour, and more likely to vote Conservative, than women under 35 in both elections. This is indicated by the statistically significant and positive main effect in the first column of Tables 5 and 6, as well as the first bar for each plot in Figure 3. In 2015, men under 35 were approximately 10 percentage points more likely to vote for the Conservatives than women of the same age, while women of this age group were 14 points more likely to vote Labour. In 2017, men under 35 were 14 points more supportive of the Conservatives than women of the same age, while women were about 15 points more supportive of Labour than men in this age group. This is in line with H2A. This pattern remains with the controls included in model 2, but with smaller gender gaps, indicating that some of the gender-by-age differences in vote choice results from the socioeconomic factors emphasised by the gender vote gap literature.

Economic/financial pessimism is included in model 3, and these indicators largely have a statistically significant effect on vote choice (more so in 2015 than in 2017), with more pessimistic voters more likely to vote Labour than the Conservatives. Once economic/financial pessimism is included, the gender differences in 2015 for the youngest group shrinks to around 4 percentage points for Conservative support, and to around 7 percentage points for Labour support, consistent with H2B. In 2017, the size of the gap for the youngest age group in both Conservative and Labour support shrinks to about 7 percentage points, also in line with H2B. In both cases, the main effect of gender in Tables 5 and 6 becomes statistically insignificant, suggesting that once we account for economic/financial pessimism gender is no longer relevant for vote choice among the under-35s. The results indicate that in both elections, younger women’s greater financial and economic pessimism relative to their male counterparts was related to their greater likelihood of voting Labour.

In 2015, the older age groups show no gender difference in Labour support, but women aged over 65 were about 10 percentage points more supportive of the Conservatives than men their age. However, while the controls somewhat reduce the gender difference in Conservative support at older age groups, economic/financial pessimism makes little difference. In 2017, there is no gender difference at older ages. This is interesting in the context of the reversal between Labour and the Conservatives in terms of their policies towards older voters.

Figures 4 and 5 show gender differences within age groups for men and women separately, for Conservative and Labour, respectively. Positive numbers indicate that the age group has more support for the party than the under-35s. There are clear differences in both Labour and Conservative support by life-stage for women in 2015, consistent with H3A. Those aged 35–64 are about 20 percentage points more supportive of the Conservatives, and less supportive of Labour, than the under-35s. For the over 65s, this figure is 30 percentage points. These age differences reduce in size once the controls are added, which fits with theories contending that younger women should be more left-wing than older women because of their greater labour force participation, higher education rates, and greater likelihood of being single (Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2004; Edlund and Pande, 2002; Inglehart and Norris, 2000, 2003; Manza and Brooks, 1998). However, the age differences among women shrink even further to less than 10 percentage points in all cases once economic/financial pessimism is included. The interaction between gender and being aged 65+ also becomes statistically insignificant in this model. This suggests that differences in economic/financial pessimism between younger and older women in 2015 play a role in shaping their vote differences, as expected by H3B. By contrast, the age differences in vote choice for men in 2015 are very small and largely disappear once the controls are added.

As previously documented, the age differences in vote choice in 2017 were extremely large (Curtice, 2017), although we find that they are larger for women. Model 1, with just gender and its interactions, shows that women aged over 65 were 44 percentage points more supportive of the Conservatives than women under 35, compared with 29 percentage points for men. Similarly, women under 35 were 40 percentage points more supportive of Labour than women over 65, compared with 26 percentage points for men. Adding the controls in model 2 reduces the size of these differences somewhat, but adding economic/financial pessimism in model 3 makes very little difference to the magnitude of these age differences and the interaction between gender and age group remains statistically significant in Table 6. The lack of importance of economic/financial pessimism for age differences in vote choice in 2017, compared with 2015, likely results from higher pessimism in all age groups about their financial and economic situation by 2017. Furthermore, other factors are associated with the age gap in the 2017 election, such as the collapse of UK Independence Party (UKIP), for whom particularly older men have been more likely to vote (Ford and Goodwin, 2014; Green and Prosser, 2018).

Discussion

Our analysis of the 2015 and 2017 general elections illustrates the relevance of economic policy for gender differences in vote choice. We find that women were more pessimistic than men about their financial and economic situation, consistent with the argument that women were hurt more by austerity than men. This pessimism is associated with vote choice, and with the interaction between gender and life-stage.

Younger women in particular were more pessimistic on average than men in their economic and financial outlooks, as expected by H1. We suggest younger women’s greater economic and financial pessimism can be linked to a number of factors. First, younger women are more reliant on transfer payments than younger men: on average, benefits and tax credits comprise one-fifth of women’s income, and under one-tenth of men’s (Annesley, 2014). Women’s greater reliance on benefits and tax credits meant that cuts to housing benefits, the weekly benefit cap, and cuts to Universal Credit – benefit reductions from which pensioners were exempt – not only hit younger ages, but disproportionately affected younger women. Approximately 60% of those hit by cuts to housing benefit were single women, for example, compared with 3% of single men (Rubery and Rafferty, 2013). Second, younger women are more likely to have caring responsibilities than younger men (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2011). Reductions in Child Tax Credits (used to subsidise the cost of childcare), Child Benefit freezes, and reductions in Sure Start funding are most likely to affect lower-income women, as they are more reliant on these payments and services (Rubery and Rafferty, 2013). Meanwhile, women from Black and minority ethnic groups are among those hardest hit, as they comprise 40% of those living in low-income households (Colney, 2012). Given the sample size of the survey, it was not possible to break the data down into further demographic sub-categories; instead, we use the broader category of ‘life-stage’ to capture many different groups who were disproportionately affected by austerity. Future research should, therefore, explore these sub-categories further in order to examine intra-sex differences more comprehensively.

Conversely, older women were less likely than younger women to think that their financial and economic situation had worsened, and were more similar to men in their economic assessments. Pension flexibilities, the ‘triple lock’, and pensioner benefits all likely contributed towards older women feeling less pessimistic about their finances. The increase in the Basic State Pension, due to the ‘triple lock’, benefitted older women in particular, who are more reliant on the state pension as a source of income (Rummery, 2016).

In line with H2A, we find that younger women were both more likely to vote Labour and less likely to vote Conservative than younger men in both elections. Economic and financial pessimism were positively associated with voting for Labour, and including these variables rendered the gender vote gap at younger ages small and statistically insignificant in both elections, in line with H2B. This suggests that Labour’s anti-austerity policies proved appealing to younger women in both 2015 and 2017. Such proposals (such as a review of Universal Credit in 2015, and the abolition of the two-child policy on Child Tax Credits in 2017) would largely benefit women of working-age or caregivers, who are more reliant on these benefits and services (Stephenson, 2011). Meanwhile, Conservative taxation policies, such as proposals to increase the Income Tax threshold, likely proved more attractive to men than women since they comprise the majority of higher earners.

Finally, H3A expected older women to be more supportive of the Conservatives and less supportive of Labour relative to younger women, and H3B expected that this difference would be related to younger women’s economic/financial pessimism. We find that this is the case in 2015, where anti-austerity policies pledged by Labour, combined with generous pension policies pledged by the Conservatives, likely contributed towards the strong age differences among women at this election. The pattern we see in 2015 resembles the ‘gender-generation gap’ seen in other countries, where younger women vote for left-wing parties, and older women vote for right-wing parties, in greater numbers than their male peers. However, this pattern has not been seen in prior British elections (Campbell, 2006; Shorrocks, 2016) and does not disappear once we control for socioeconomic factors thought to be important for the ‘gender-generation gap’. This suggests that it is not wholly due to a long-term process of socioeconomic change as Inglehart and Norris (2000, 2003) suggest, but at least partially a product of the specific recent economic and policy context in Britain.

Although older women were more supportive of the Conservatives and less supportive of Labour than younger women in 2017, this age gap does not change once we include economic/financial pessimism in the model, and as such, H3B does not hold in 2017. In 2017, Conservative support among older women and men increased relative to younger voters, reflecting the role of Brexit in exacerbating age differences at this election. This was especially notable for men, for whom there were few age differences in 2015. This can partly be explained by older men – previously more likely than older women to vote UKIP – defecting to the Conservatives (Green and Prosser, 2018). Older women were also still drawn to the Conservatives despite the party offering fewer pensioner benefits in 2017. The prominence of Brexit as the context for the 2017 election meant that older women, and older voters more generally, displayed strong Conservative support despite their pension and social care policies.

By 2017, both genders across all life-stages became more pessimistic in their economic and financial assessments, suggesting concerns about the UK economy in the context of Brexit and continued austerity. As all voters became more pessimistic in their economic attitudes, we find that the gender differences in their voting behaviour narrowed, serving to further demonstrate the contingent influence of economic context, policy, and attitudes on gender differences in voting.

Conclusion

Our analysis provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between austerity, economic policies, and gender differences in vote choice. Labour’s offer of anti-austerity policies in the 2015 and 2017 elections appear to have gained them the support of younger women. Meanwhile, older generations were less likely to report economic/financial pessimism, probably in part due to the generous pension policies and increased spending on pensioner benefits implemented under the Coalition/Conservative governments, which helped to protect those in their later life-stages from the harshest effects of austerity.

There is a caveat to these conclusions. Economic and financial perceptions might be partially endogenous to party support (Evans and Andersen, 2006); supporters of the incumbent party may hold more favourable views on the economic and financial situation, whereas voters supporting other parties may hold negative assessments. This may exaggerate the relationship found here between economic pessimism and vote choice. Future research could perhaps use the Internet panel elements of the BES to explore these relationships further.

Socioeconomic theories that have sought to explain gender-age differences in vote choice by focusing on long-term change (Inglehart and Norris, 2000, 2003; Iversen and Rosenbluth, 2006; Manza and Brooks, 1998) thus only offer a partial explanation for such patterns. Labour’s success among younger women and the Conservative’s high support among older women was not a consistent feature of British elections prior to 2015 (Campbell, 2006; Shorrocks, 2016), suggesting that the extent to which we see gender gaps at different life-stages in any given election depends partly on the economic and electoral context. Future research should therefore not only consider long-term, socioeconomic factors when analysing the gender gap but should also devote attention to the specific context in which elections are fought, and how policy positions may explain change in party support between elections.

As the impact of austerity has taken its toll, it has become clear that both men and women at all life-stages have become more pessimistic in their economic and financial perceptions. Since assuming office, Theresa May has sought to distribute the burden of austerity more evenly across all age groups. However, continued austerity measures could have ramifications on Conservative support not only among younger women but also among its core base of older women voters too. Unless the Conservative Party can soften its agenda of fiscal retrenchment, it is unlikely that it will win back its traditional lead among women voters before the next election.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental_Material – Supplemental material for All in this together? Austerity and the gender-age gap in the 2015 and 2017 British general elections

Supplemental material, Supplemental_Material for All in this together? Austerity and the gender-age gap in the 2015 and 2017 British general elections by Anna Sanders and Rosalind Shorrocks in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Francesca Gains, Maria Sobolewska and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript. We would also like to thank participants at the Political Studies Association (PSA) Annual International Conference 2018 and the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) Conference 2018 for helpful feedback and discussions on this paper.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Anna Sanders

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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