The Political Economy of Gender: Explaining Cross‐National Variation in the Gender Division of Labor and the Gender Voting Gap

Abstract

Mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy. In a world with high divorce rates, we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct. We find that labor market opportunities for women, which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state, affect women's bargaining power within the family and as a result, can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences.