How Robust Is the Modern Gender Gap in Political Ideology?

ABSTRACT Recent decades have seen growing attention to an emerging ideological divide between young men and women, with women increasingly adopting more left-leaning political orientations than men - the so-called modern gender gap. This thesis examines how robust this pattern is, across two independent studies. Study 1 uses data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) to test whether the modern gender gap generalizes beyond the Western European samples on which existing evidence is largely based. Study 2 examines whether a prior claim (Burn-Murdoch, 2024) reporting a sharp, consistent widening of the modern gender gap in specific countries - holds up in sensitivity analysis, under alternative coding schemes.