Four days after the vote, the comments on the electoral data concern above all the distribution of seats. How big is the center-right majority? How many seats would the left have taken by making more alliances, but above all, if the electoral law had been different?
There is another number, however, that cannot be ignored, which is not a source of astonishment and will not even be at the next elections: it is the one that concerns an ever-decreasing turnout. Never so low for the political elections in Italy, where on 25 September only 63.95 per cent of the people entitled to vote stood at the polls.
There is a fact to note, with respect to these data: in Italy you still vote by lining up at the seats in queues divided for men and women, the registers are separate, but the data disaggregated by sex are the last to arrive. 24 hours pass before we can finally read those figures in a gender perspective, and in reality it becomes possible to do so only thanks to the work of those who extract the information from the Eligendo site – the official source of the Ministry of the Interior with the data of all the elections – and publishes them in open format, in particular the OnData association.
As could be imagined by observing the trend of recent years, the figure is the lowest ever even for female turnout. Only 62.19 percent of Italians exercised their right to vote, compared to 65.74 percent of voters, a number that increases when it becomes absolute because in the vast majority of Italian municipalities, 68 percent, can more women than men vote.
Looking at the data on a national scale, in 2022 the municipalities where women exercised this right to a greater extent are 12 per cent. The gap also in 2022 seems smaller in smaller municipalities while it is greater in large cities, where the connection with active politics in the territory is more complex and dispersed. Nuoro is an exception as the provincial capital where in 2022 more women than eligible men voted (however, less than 40 thousand people live there, 36,900 according to 2017 data).
In OECD countries, in the most recent elections for which statistics are available, voter turnout averaged 69 percent. The difference between the participation rate of men and women is small in most countries but in Switzerland, where women were last to vote in Europe at the municipal level (in 1971) and in the cantons only in 1990, men outnumber women by about 5 percentage points, as in Italy in 2018.
The data of the Italian turnout must be looked at in a historical perspective: according to sociologists Dario Tuorto and Laura Sartori, who collected data on the turnout of voters and electricians from 1948 to today (we added 2022), the fact that after the 1948 and until the early 1980s there was hardly any gap depends on the initial enthusiasm of women for a newly acquired right and on their role in the society of those years: many women voted on the recommendation of their husbands or on push, even moralistic , of the Church, which for a long time had a central role in favoring the exercise of the right to vote, for men and women.
As Enzo Risso also wrote in Domani, anticipating the result of these elections, the turnout in Italy is “a physiological fact that has become a pathology”. According to Risso, until 2001, voting a blank ballot was the main gesture of protest against a policy by which one no longer felt represented, while since the following elections people have chosen to stay directly at home, because they no longer feel the responsibility to go to vote. For women, this demobilization is even greater and in the last elections it reached a peak not only in absolute terms but also in the gap between men and women.
Nor does the increase in female representation in institutions and in parliament seem to have an impact on the desire to exercise one’s right to vote. Perhaps because presence does not always translate into relevance, and the participation of a few in the government has not substantially changed the policies and lives of many: in Italy today less than one in two women works and there are a 28.3 percentage points gap. between the male and female employment rate in the presence of a child.
But why don’t women vote?
Parties are traditionally associations dominated by a male culture, and even after the entry of women into the organizational structure they have not changed. Women struggle to find a space and consequently also to take an interest in party politics. The reason for their abstention could therefore be the separation that persists in Italian society between the public dimension, of government and work, and the private one, of home and care: the first is a male dimension and the second female. This persistence ties into a traditional pattern in which men primarily work and women primarily care.
In Italy, many women do not have time for politics. The management of women’s time depends on working at home and Istat data tell us that the totally unbalanced distribution of care work produces a disadvantage for women precisely in the free time available. Time for oneself is lost in the management of the house, of children, of the elderly: in fact, for women it decreases with age as the burden of care due to a husband, children, elderly parents, grandchildren increases. . Political participation is linked to the use of time: time to get information, time to discuss, time to participate in demonstrations, rallies, meetings.
The greater the inequalities, the lower the participation of women in the vote
Younger women have more time for political life, and more educated women even participate more than their male peers. Tuorto and Sartori also point out that participation in the vote could be a reflection of the desire of young women to take part in the public sphere, a desire that is also reflected in their greater propensity to study.
The level of education differentiates the electoral behavior between women and men, for women the study represents a driving force both to find a job and to go to vote. Employment is crucial for participation: if we look at the geographical dimension of voting (but also of civic participation), women participate more in political life in northern Italy where the employment rate is in line with the European average, and in the small centers where time management and access to social services are facilitated.
Young, employed, educated, residing in small towns especially in the north: if this is the profile of women who participate more in political life, the profile of the abstentionist is instead a woman of over sixty, residing in a city in the south, with a low educational qualification and, probably, poor (we do not have this data but it is probably not wrong). The gender gap (of 20 percentage points) is mainly attributable to this segment of the population that lives in a situation of social marginalization.
Generally speaking, the greater the inequalities, the lower the participation of women in the vote. And the participation gap increases in adulthood, because the condition of women in the labor market – in terms of employment, wages and quality – worsens over the years and turn into a bad old age.
In this perspective, the higher the level of education, the economic autonomy, the availability of free time, the access to information, the greater the participation in the vote of women. Perhaps the abstention of women could therefore be read as the protest of thousands of Italians with respect to their conditions of marginalization. If this hypothesis were plausible, it is not surprising that in these elections there was a record of female abstention and the leader of a party that has as its horizon the patriarchal family and the traditional division of roles won.
Barbara Leda Kenny will be at the Internazionale festival in Ferrara on 2 October with a meeting on feminist urbanism.