Abstract:

The article deals with the important and insufficiently studied problem of specificity of the gender influence on electors’ orientations in modern Ukraine. The studies fixed the presence of gender gaps in the electoral behavior – certain difference in electoral activity (participation in elections) and electoral preferences (decision about whom to give the own voice) among men and women. Based on the analysis of the situation in the Ukrainian society, there was determined, that the real gender gap in the electoral behavior of women and men is conditioned by the series of factors: historical (1), ideological (2), economic (3), social (4), political (5), cognitive-propagandist (6), stereotype and others (7).Their influence really determines a motivation of making electoral decisions by them. It was established, that just these factors, added by the series of partial ones (regional, type and level of elections, strategies of organizing election campaigns and so on) determine the presence of differences in the electoral behavior of men and women. Present gender gaps testify not only to the difference in the attitude to elections, they manifest the difference in approaches as to the attitude to the whole totality of social and political problems among men and women. Historical, economic, social, political, ideological factors, separated at the analysis, are more or less manifested in gender stereotypes that function in the society, that describe and legitimize men’s and women’s status in the society, their attitude to different social phenomena that results in the necessity to take them into account obligatorily at organizing elections.

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