Women and Alex Salmond: An academic postscript...

Last week, I took a skeptical look at the received wisdom, echoed most recently by the Economist magazine, that women in Scotland aren't terrifically keen on Alex Salmond. Trawling through polls going back to 2009, and looking at how satisfaction with his performance broke down by gender, I argued that the data suggests something of an "enthusiasm gap" for the First Minister.  Men like him more than women, but Scottish women did not assess his activities in Bute House significantly more negatively than Scottish men.  He comfortably drubs Cameron, Miliband, Clegg, Davidson, Rennie and Lamont amongst both men and women.

In response, one of the authors directed my attention towards a paper very recently published in the academic journal, Political Parties. For those interested and able to access it, the precise citation is: Robert Johns, Lynn Bennie and James Mitchell (2012) ‘Gendered nationalism: The gender gap in support for the Scottish National Party’ Party Politics 18(4) 581 – 601.  The piece focusses on the Holyrood election result of 2007.  According to the Scottish Election Survey for that year, 35% of men voted for the SNP on the regional list, compared to 27% of women. As we saw in the preliminary data released from the 2011 Scottish Election Survey, the SNP managed to close this gap to just 3% in the most recent Holyrood ballot, with 43% of women and 46% of men voting for the Nationalists on the list respectively.

Bracketing these recent developments, the Political Parties article examines alternative explanations for the gap we saw in 2007. (Johns, Bennie and Mitchell's conclusion, incidentally, is that men are more likely than women to vote for the SNP because men are more likely than women to support independence, for whatever reasons).  Amongst the factors considered by the authors was Alex Salmond's leadership. Were women "not keen", or at least less "keen" on him than men?  Here's the critical section:

“Here the SES (“Scottish Election Survey”) evidence comes from a series of leadership ratings on an 11-point like-dislike scale. The mean male rating of Salmond was around half a point higher than the mean female rating, a difference which appears more substantial in the light of the general tendency for women to report more positive evaluations. Salmond was the only politician included in the survey to elicit significantly higher ratings from male respondents. The upshot is that, where leader evaluations are controlled, the net gender gap narrows by around one-third. Two points are worth noting about this. Firstly while females were less positive than males about the SNP leader, they nonetheless rated him more highly in absolute terms than any of the other politicians. The implication is that, insofar as leadership can be account for the gender gap in SNP voting, this is because Salmond won support from men rather than losing it among women. Second, leadership evaluations are likely to be causally posterior to some of the factors already considered. For example, it could be that males preferred Alex Salmond because he led a party to which they were already particularly favourably disposed, perhaps because they share the SNP’s preference for independence. In that case, differences in leadership evaluations are a by-product and not a cause of the gender gap under study here.” [Johns, Bennie and Mitchell 2012, 588]

Quite coincidentally, this tallies rather neatly with the idea of an "enthusiasm gap" captured in the Ipsos-MORI polling on Salmond we were looking at last week, and gives the lie to the Economist's rather sketchy, rather crude assessment of the political sensibilities of female Scots. What is left unanswered, however, is why the devil women remain more reticent about independence than men.  The authors admit they don't know.  Neither do I.

If Johns, Bennie and Mitchell's thesis is correct, however, and the gender gap in SNP support in the 2007 election is attributable to a gender gap in support for independence, the changes in the Nationalists' electoral fortunes between 2011 and 2007 may repay close study for YesScotland.  After all, during this period of time, the party's constitutional policies were basically unaltered.  If the female vote faltered for the SNP in 2007, and more or less caught up with men in 2011, something must have changed. It may well be, however, that the two elections were simply fought in different terms, concerned with different priorities, and women's disagreement with independence was mostly just de-emphasised rather than altered or eliminated as a factor weighing against supporting the Nationalists between their tentative first and thumping second victories.

If something along these lines is the case, and the gist of the Jones, Bennie and Mitchell thesis holds for 2011 as in 2007, the SNP managed strongly to attract women's votes despite their attitudes to independence in the last election. In 2014, YesScotland faces a far more daunting task: to attract women to independence, despite independence. No pressure.