This chapter examines the gender gaps in Bolivians’ voting behavior by using the 1998–2023 LAPOP database, the seventh wave of the World Values Survey in Bolivia (2017) and the PELA dataset for Bolivia. Voting is mandatory, yet structural obstacles generate a gender gap in turnout involving the electoral register that has impeded the exercise of the vote for women in equal conditions to those of men. Data indicate that women have a higher likelihood to vote “void” and “blank” than men do. As for the ideological gender gap, the entire country has shifted to the left in the past 25 years, specifically during the government of the Movimiento al Socialismo (the Movement for Socialism), but no evident gender gap is seen along the ideological scale in voting preferences. Women’s specific problems and needs and demands and aspirations of feminist organizations are not relevant in the electoral debate or in the political offer of Bolivian parties, whether they are left-wing or right-wing parties. Finally, populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs) do not exist in Bolivian politics; right-wing parties started to gain public attention only after 2019. And data show that Bolivian women are less likely to vote for these parties than men are.

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What Gender Gap? The Female Vote in Bolivia

  • Vivian Schwarz-Blum,
  • Eduardo Córdova Eguivar

摘要

This chapter examines the gender gaps in Bolivians’ voting behavior by using the 1998–2023 LAPOP database, the seventh wave of the World Values Survey in Bolivia (2017) and the PELA dataset for Bolivia. Voting is mandatory, yet structural obstacles generate a gender gap in turnout involving the electoral register that has impeded the exercise of the vote for women in equal conditions to those of men. Data indicate that women have a higher likelihood to vote “void” and “blank” than men do. As for the ideological gender gap, the entire country has shifted to the left in the past 25 years, specifically during the government of the Movimiento al Socialismo (the Movement for Socialism), but no evident gender gap is seen along the ideological scale in voting preferences. Women’s specific problems and needs and demands and aspirations of feminist organizations are not relevant in the electoral debate or in the political offer of Bolivian parties, whether they are left-wing or right-wing parties. Finally, populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs) do not exist in Bolivian politics; right-wing parties started to gain public attention only after 2019. And data show that Bolivian women are less likely to vote for these parties than men are.