Mauro Barisione

The transformation of the Radical Right Gender Gap: The case of the 2014 EP Election

. Using the 2014 European Election Studies dataset, this paper revisits the RRGG in a comparative perspective, analyzing gender as a predictor of vote choice for Radical Right Parties in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands and Sweden. While the gender gap persists once controlled for education, age, religion and occupation, the interaction of gender with political attitudes and leftright ideology significantly affects electoral support for RR parties in the six cases studied. And the RRGG appears tightly entangled with the "traditional gender gap" on the one side and the "modern gender-generation gap" on the other.

Introduction

Since the pioneer insight of Hans Georg [START_REF] Betz | Radical right wing populism in Western Europe[END_REF] a large body of literature has tried to explain the unequal support of men and women for the Populist Radical Rights that have developed in Europe since the 1980s -or "Radical Right Gender Gap" [START_REF] Givens | The Radical Right Gender Gap[END_REF][START_REF] Norris | Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market[END_REF][START_REF] Rippeyoung | When women are Right :the influence of gender, work and values on European far right party support[END_REF][START_REF] Mudde | Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Immerzeel | Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting: a cross national investigation in 12 Western European countries[END_REF][START_REF] De Bruijn | The gender gap in radical right voting: explaining differences in the Netherlands[END_REF][START_REF] Immerzeel | Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting: a cross national investigation in 12 Western European countries[END_REF] 1 . However until recently few studies had attempted a systematic study of the RRGG, controlling for the possible effect of other variables. Those who did show large variations in the gap from one country to another [START_REF] Immerzeel | Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting: a cross national investigation in 12 Western European countries[END_REF]. In addition, even where this gap existed, things might be changing [START_REF] Barisione | Marine Le Pen et les femmes : la fin du Radical Right Gender Gap en France et en Europe? Paper presented at the French Political Science Association Congress[END_REF], at a time when Radical Right Parties increasingly present themselves as women friendly, targeting Islam and Muslims in the name of democratic values and women's rights (Akkerman and Haggelund, 2007;[START_REF] De Lange | Gender and right-wing populism in the Low Countries: ideological variations across parties and time[END_REF]. In France for instance, while gender had a significant impact on the votes for Jean-Marie Le Pen, it had none on the votes for his daughter in the 2012 presidential election, once controlled by age, education, religious practice, occupation and left right position (Mayer, 2013a and2013b). Therefore this paper proposes a re-examination of the impact of gender on voting in the 2014 EP (European Parliament) Election.

A first section revisits the literature about the successive electoral gender gaps through recent decades. A second one presents our research strategy and methodology. A third one tests our hypotheses, using data from the 2014 European Election Studies in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, and Sweden.

Theoretical framework: revisiting the electoral gender gap(s)

From traditional to modern gender gap

The term "gender gap" was coined in the US by the National Organization of Women (NOW) at the time of the election of Ronald Reagan. In the 1980 American presidential race, for the first time since they got the right to vote, women gave more support to the Democrats. Since then this gap has persisted, and there is a robust relation between gender and vote, still significant after controlling for age, class, race and religion [START_REF] Manza | The gender gap in U.S. presidential elections : When? Why? Implications ?[END_REF][START_REF] Whitaker | Voting. The gender gap[END_REF][START_REF] Abendschön | The Gender Gap in Voting Revisited: Women's Party Preferences in a European Context[END_REF]. A similar divide has appeared since in several post industrial democracies, and notably in Europe [START_REF] Inglehart | Rising Tide[END_REF][START_REF] Mossuz-Lavau | Genre et politique. Y-a-t-il une exception française?[END_REF][START_REF] Giger | Towards a modern gender gap in Europe? A comparative analysis of voting behaviour in 12 countries[END_REF], women moving more to the left than men whatever the indicator used. It was called the "modern gender gap", in opposition to the previous "traditional" one.

Women in most countries got the right to vote long after men. They first tended to be more conservative, and give more support than men to right wing parties with a traditional view of women's role and family [START_REF] Mossuz-Lavau | Enquête sur les femmes et la politique en France[END_REF]. Their progressive dealignment from the right and realignment towards the left, according to the developmental theories framed by Inglehart and Norris (1999), reflects structural and cultural changes occurring in most post industrial societies after World War 2.

Women's rising level of education and their massive entrance in the labour market on the one hand, the process of secularization, the break-up of traditional family units, and the emancipating influence of post-materialist values and feminist movementsencouraging autonomy and self expression -on the other hand, brought them gradually closer to left-wing parties. This was particularly the case among the younger generations, leading Pippa Norris to coin the term of "generation gender gap" [START_REF] Norris | Mobilizing the Women's Vote: The Gender-Generation Gap in Voting Behaviour[END_REF]. In the long run, generational replacement should even expand the process: "If a generational rather than a life-cycle effect, as seems most likely, this suggests that the process of generational turnover will probably continue to move women leftwards. In the long-term, as younger voters gradually replace older generations, through secular turnover, the modern gender gap should therefore strengthen and consolidate in established democracies. " (Inglehart and Norris, 2000, p. 459).

The emergence of a Radical Right Gender Gap

Since the 1980s though, the electoral boom of radical right anti immigrant parties, especially in Europe, has brought about a third cleavage, women appearing more reluctant to give their votes to these parties. Hans-Georg Betz was the first to outline the phenomenon (Betz, 1994, p.142-148), and the difference seems to persist [START_REF] Givens | The Radical Right Gender Gap[END_REF][START_REF] Norris | Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market[END_REF][START_REF] Immerzeel | Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting: a cross national investigation in 12 Western European countries[END_REF][START_REF] De Bruijn | The gender gap in radical right voting: explaining differences in the Netherlands[END_REF]. Both structural and attitudinal factors have been put forward to account for what has become known as the "Radical Right Gender Gap" [START_REF] Givens | The Radical Right Gender Gap[END_REF].

A first line of argument considers the gendered division of labour [START_REF] Mayer | Ces Français qui votent Le Pen[END_REF][START_REF] Givens | The Radical Right Gender Gap[END_REF][START_REF] Rippeyoung | When women are Right :the influence of gender, work and values on European far right party support[END_REF][START_REF] Studlar | Explaining the gender gap in voting: a cross national analysis[END_REF]. Men are still overrepresented in manual occupations, particularly among industrial blue collars (ouvriers), the "globalization losers" by excellence. In competition with cheap labour in developing countries on the one side and with immigrants inside the country on the other, they are the most likely to support the Radical Right [START_REF] Betz | Radical right wing populism in Western Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Kitschelt | The Radical Right in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Kriesi | West European Politics in the Age of Globalization[END_REF][START_REF] Oesch | Explaining Voters' support for right-wing populist parties in Western Europe; Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway and Switzerland[END_REF][START_REF] Bornschier | The populist right, the working class, and the changing face of class politics[END_REF]. Conversely, women are more often employed in non-manual clerical or services jobs and in the public sector, and hold on the whole economically more secure positions and less exposed to immigration. Therefore they should be less inclined to turn to the Radical Right.

A second line of research stresses the greater religiosity of women. Christian Churches all over Europe have repeatedly condemned the anti-immigrant and inegalitarian message of the Radical Rights in the name of the Evangels. Although a process of secularization is taking place in post-industrial European societies, women, especially the elderly, still attend religious services more often than men. They should therefore be more likely to hear the warnings of the Church. Sineau (2004, p.220) has showed that in Catholic France, not only women go to church more often than men, they are also more receptive to the Christian message. At similar level of religious practice than men, they were far less inclined to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2002 Presidential election, the gap reaching its peak among elderly women that were catholic and regular church-goers. These remnants of the "traditional gender gap" could explain the RRGG of today.

A third block of research, more in line with the modern gender gap perspective, points on the contrary to the gradual diffusion of feminist ideas at all levels of society -a "rising tide" [START_REF] Inglehart | Rising Tide[END_REF]. This could prevent women, especially the new highly educated generations, from supporting far right parties that defend a traditional ideology, reducing them to their role of spouses and mothers. Conversely, the very spread of feminist ideas, the claims for equality and the growing presence of women in the work force could be seen as a threat for masculine supremacy, breeding insecurity and resentment and feeding an authoritarian anti-feminist vote for the far right [START_REF] Perrineau | Le symptôme Le Pen[END_REF]. This is even more likely in working class and blue collars milieus, where norms of strong manhood and masculinity, based on physical strength, still predominate [START_REF] Frader | Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model[END_REF][START_REF] Molinier | Déconstruire la crise de la masculinité[END_REF].

A last line of research stresses the persistence of gender stereotypes from early socialisation and their impact in the political realm [START_REF] Mossuz-Lavau | Genre et politique. La marche vers l'indifférenciation[END_REF][START_REF] Huddy | Gender Stereotypes and the Perception of Male and Female Candidates[END_REF][START_REF] Lahire | Héritages sexués : incorporation des habitudes et des croyances[END_REF]. Girls are still brought up differently than boys, expected not to be violent or aggressive. Women in surveys, for instance, appear systematically less in favour of war and conflict 2 . The image of extremism associated to Radical Right Parties could be a deterrent factor for them. Women are also less trained to assert themselves, to confront disagreement or question social norms [START_REF] Immerzeel | Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting: a cross national investigation in 12 Western European countries[END_REF]. One of the main finding of a study based on three waves of the CSES data in 32 countries shows that men are politically more "assertive" than women, more likely to cast a vote for new or ambiguous parties, whatever their political stands: "the more other respondents indicated to highly dislike the party, the smaller the relative share of female voters" [START_REF] Harteveld | The Gender Gap in Voting: Extremity, Ambiguity and Social Cues[END_REF] p.12; also see [START_REF] Immerzeel | Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting: a cross national investigation in 12 Western European countries[END_REF].

Beyond the "Radical Right Gender Gap" approach

That having been said, one may ask if the different explanations put forward to explain the RRGG are still relevant today, in a context of economic recession and political disaffection. Indeed, new conditions potentially favoring a shift toward the opposite direction, i.e. an erosion of the RRGG, could easily be identified.

Since 2008, the deteriorating economic situation is blurring the bordure between manual and non--manual positions, with both white--collar women in service jobs and blue--collar men in manufacturing jobs being increasingly exposed to part time and low paid insecure positions. As a consequence, women's level of support for the Radical Right should come closer to men's 3 . In addition, religion could work less as a protection against intolerance and feed, on the contrary, anti--Muslim and anti--minorities' resentment in a context of anti--Muslim polarization. A similar backlash trend may concern feminist attitudes. As a belief in equality between men and women, feminism should less clearly deter women from supporting Radical Right Parties, which are gendering the immigration issue and presenting Islam as a threat to women's rights. Finally, the ideologically less extreme and thus more acceptable image given by some of these Radical Rights could weaken the reluctance of female voters to vote for them. Hence, the RRGG might well be in transition, with forces pulling in different directions.

One may even go further, considering that the exclusive focus on the latest research on the "RRGG" and its size are more an obstacle than a help to understand what gender does to electoral behavior. Indeed, the emergence of a RRGG does not necessarily mean that the two previous electoral gaps have disappeared; they need to be articulated together. Moreover, what matters is not just the size of the gap, but the level of support for RR. The fact that there is no radical right gender gap left could have two opposite meanings: that women give the same high support to RR than men or, conversely, that they show the same rejection of these parties. Similarly, the same gap in size can have totally different meanings. Our assumption, in line with Sineau's finding, is that two types of women can be less willing than men to vote for the radical right for opposite reasons. In certain parts of the electorate, this will reflect a modern gender gap, with young educated women being ideologically more progressive and left-wing than men, thus more reluctant to support RR. In other parts, a traditional gender gap may subsist, with elderly, religious women being more prone than men to support conservative mainstream parties rather than the extreme right. This implies that one should explore more closely the specific interactions between gender and the other variables that explain support for the radical right: age, education, occupation, religion, left-right position and social attitudes (especially relative to immigration and feminism/post materialism), and see how gender gaps -in the plural -appear, disappear or overlap.

Theoretical expectations

In this paper, due not only to limitations of space but also in the number of variables available in the 2014 EES dataset, we focus on a specific set of expectations arising from our theoretical framework, which combines -as suggested abovepresence/absence of the RRGG with high/low levels of support for the radical right.

In addition, we are interested in disentangling "traditional" and "modern" forms of radical right gender gap.

The framework presented below precisely combines levels of gender gap (yes=significant; no= absent or statistically non significant) with levels of support for radical right parties (yes=highest; no=lowest). This four-cell table enables us to differentiate between cases of inter-gender "equal rejection" (no Gender Gap and no Radical Right support) and "equal support" (high RR score with no GG) on the one side; between cases of "traditional" gap in radical right support (high RR score, especially among men voters) and "modern" patterns of rejection of the RR (women scoring particularly low) on the other side. Within this bi-dimensional framework for analysis of the radical right gender gap, the conventional concern about the magnitude of this gap is only a starting point -a broad picture that necessitates zooming in further into the complexities of this topic.

As for this "broad picture", we expect -given the contradictory trends outlined in the previous section -to find only a mild gender gap in our overall measure of support for radical right parties in the six countries considered. We also anticipate that this gap should be reduced further, if not entirely suppressed, when introducing controls for the main sociological variables -especially education and religiosity -due to compositional gender differences along these societal lines. Finally, more general ideological orientations (such as left-right self-placement) and social attitudes (e.g. toward immigrants) should result as the fundamental "mediators" of support for radical right parties, i.e. the radical right gender gap should disappear when holding these factors equal across gender.

After investigating this general pattern, however, we will move on to consider more specific interactions of gender with a set of theoretically relevant variables, which might act as "moderators" of the radical right gender gap 4 . Indeed, we argue that the issue of gender heterogeneity -i.e. women and men voters being considered not as homogenous blocs but in their intra-group differentiations -is too often neglected in the study of political gender gaps in general, and of the radical right gender gap in particular. Yet we know from scholarly literature that two gender-based mechanisms might coexist and drive the overall RRGG: the first one implies that a category of women present, both in social and ideological terms, all the typical features of RR voters but actually tend to vote less for these parties than men, possibly due to their lower political "assertiveness". This category of women would thereby reflect the idea of a "traditional gender gap", with higher support for mainstream right-wing parties and lower support for radical right parties. We expect to find evidence of this mechanism possibly among elder and more religious women, and even more clearly among those with conservative ideology and less tolerant attitudes toward social outgroups.

The second mechanism points, on the contrary, to the importance of a category of women with social and political profiles completely averse to the radical right, and which we would expect to reject RR parties even more strongly than men. This expectation is based on the notion of a "modern gender gap" resting on new generations of highly educated women characterized by culturally more liberal and politically more progressive attitudes. Alongside a "modern" pattern of greater women' rejection of the radical right, we might also find evidence of "equal rejection" across similar categories of women and men voters. Finally, social economic insecurity aggravated by the economic crisis exposes women in service jobs as well as blue--collar men to unemployment, part time jobs and low paid insecure jobs. This should bring women, especially those already excluded from labour force, close to men in their level of support for the Radical Right. Hence, our set of theoretical expectations transcends -as suggested above -the mere issue of the overall magnitude of the radical right gender gap and aims to attain a more fine-grained comprehension of the phenomenon in its multiple dimensions.

Theoretical framework: Gender Gap (GG) and Radical Right support (RR)

Although our main interest lies in radical right parties as a relatively homogenous ideological family, we are not assuming cross-country homogeneity in patterns of Radical Right Gender Gap. Not only do general levels of support of RR parties differ across countries, but also the gender gap itself could differ across countries, especially depending on whether or not the RR party has pursued a strategy of normalization in the national political arena. To the extent that a normalization strategy -such as that pursued by National Front, Party of Freedom, FPÖ, and Danish People's Partymakes the RR more socially acceptable and less perceived as an ideological "outsider", women might come to present roughly the same support as men for RR parties. Of course, results concerning this last hypothesis will be suggestive at best, given the very limited number of national cases selected for this study.

Data and Method

A special attention will be given to methodological issues. Indeed, very few studies attempt a systematic analysis of the RRGG. Secondly, we test the measure of association between the two variables (vote choice and propensities to vote for a RR party) using an ANOVA. Both their overall correlation (eta= .737) and effect size (eta squared = .542) prove very strong.

Therefore, voting probabilities as collected in an immediate post-election context provide an excellent piece of information about the behavioral propensities of each respondent.

As shown in Appendix figure 1, most respondents will give the radical right party the score '0' -almost 60% overall, which corresponds to the portion of those who do not vote, and do not consider to do it, for a radical right party. But the presence of a continuous scale prevents from losing important information about: (1) radical right voters who did not turn out at a "second-order election" such as the EP election [START_REF] Reif | Nine Second order National Elections-a Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of European Election Results[END_REF][START_REF] Hix | Second-order effects plus pan-European political swings: An analysis of European Parliament elections across time[END_REF]; (2) actual or would-be radical right voters who are not declaring their vote choice due to a "social desirability" bias [START_REF] Holbrook | Social desirability bias in voter turnout reports tests using the item count technique[END_REF].

Using a stacked data matrix, we thus create a new "PTV" variable, which measures propensities to vote for the six parties altogether. To account for the country-level differences, we use a mixed effect multilevel method in which individual respondents represent level 1 and their country level 2. Our multilevel models include random (or varying) intercepts and slopes, because we assume not only that average levels of support for radical right parties vary significantly across countries, but also that gender differently predicts radical right support in different countries.

Results

The broad picture: multilevel regression models predicting the radical right gender gap

Our first hypothesis concerns the presence, magnitude and direction of a gender gap in the support of radical right parties at the 2014 EP election. As anticipated, we expect to find only a mild gender gap referencing higher male support for the European radical right, and this gender gap to possibly disappear after controlling for a set of key 'sociological' variables -namely education and religiosity.

Table 1 shows patterns of RRGG (Radical Right Gender Gap) in the six countries altogether, across different multilevel models that include varying sets of control variables: model 0 (or "Basic", i.e. with only gender as an independent variable and no other controls); model 1 ("Societal", with age, education and religiosity as controls); model 3 ("Political", which includes the respondents' participation in the 2014 EP election, their degree of political interest and their left-right self-placement); model 4 ("Policy-related", which adds two more variables tapping respondents' orientations toward two key issues in radical right parties' platforms and discourses, namely immigration and same-sex marriage). 6

As the coefficient for gender in model 0 shows, there is a fully significant gender gap in favor of higher male support for the six European radical right parties altogether.

Since the independent variable is dichotomous (male vs. female), interpretation of the coefficient is straightforward: the average PTV score (our measure of support for radical right parties on a 0-10 scale) is, on average, 0.46 points lower among women.

While this gender gap is statistically fully significant, however, in substantive terms it also looks relatively mild: if translated in percentage terms, it amounts to a gap of less than 5 percentage points between men and women voters.

The second important result comes from model 1, which reveals that the radical right gender gap is virtually unaffected by potential compositional gender differences in terms of education and religiosity. Of course, both control variables do exert an impact on radical right support, as well as age does. It is among younger, loweducated voters who do not often attend religious services that the propensities to vote for radical right parties are relatively higher. But even taking this into account, women continue to appear more reluctant than men to support these parties. As a result, our starting hypothesis is only partially confirmed: the RRGP is substantively mild, but it fails to decrease when controls by education and religiosity are introduced.

*** Table 1 here It is only when the policy-related dimension of radical right votingagreement/disagreement with restrictive migration policies and with same-sex marriage (model 3) -are entered in addition to left-right position that the gender gap loses any residual significance. This implies that men are more prone to vote for the radical right partly because they are, on average, in 2014, more right wing-oriented than women, but also slightly more restrictive than women on migration policies, as well as clearly more conservative on gender-related issues such as same-sex marriages. Hence, while there is no evidence of a compositional basis of the RRGG in societal terms -i.e. it is not because they are, on average, more religious that women vote less for the radical right (and education levels do not differ, overall) -we do find evidence of a compositional effect in terms of ideology and policy orientations across However, the broad picture is fundamentally the same across countries: a mild radical right gender gap, which is not affected by social/compositional control factors but tends to disappear when introducing left-right ideology and attitudes toward social outgroup-related policies. Hence, the hypothesis that the degree of normalization and gender friendliness of these parties matters does not hold, as the gender gap is not higher in Flanders where such a normalization strategy is not much developed, while it persists in Denmark where the People's Party has definitely made an effort to gender the immigration issue.

Going further: interaction effects of gender in the support for the European radical right

If women still are, on average, slightly less prone to support European radical right parties than men, is this gap amplified or, conversely, suppressed within certain categories of women by socio-occupational and ideological lines? Our second set of hypotheses posits the existence of significant interactions between gender and other variables that are, as shown in section 1, crucial to explaining electoral support for radical right parties. Moreover, we expect not only the magnitude, but also the meaning of the radical right gender gap to vary across categories of voters, given that no gender gap, for instance, can imply men and women equally supporting or, on the contrary, equally rejecting radical right parties.

Following the framework presented in our "four-cell table", we estimate five different interaction models based on mixed-effect multilevel regression model 1 (societal), as

shown in equations 1-5 (see Appendix A). For each model, we will not present all parameter estimates for every interaction term and control variable included, but just the specific marginal effects of gender resulting from the interaction model, i.e. the statistically most meaningful results [START_REF] Brambor | Understanding interaction models: Improving empirical analyses[END_REF].

Figure 2 presents marginal effects of low vs. high education levels on the RRGG. We find no significant gender gap at low education levels but a clear gender gap (0.8, i.e.

significantly higher than the average value of 0.45 drawn from Table 1) at high education levels. These two gaps conceal however different average levels of RR support. Among the less educated respondents, PTV scores are significantly higher than average (3.4 for men, 3.0 for women, 2.3 the overall average); among the more educated, while scores reflect the average value among men (2.2), they reach their lowest level among women (1.4). In other words, what we find here is a pattern of "modern rejection", with educated women presenting -as in the more general case of the "modern gender gap" -more progressive, less conservative political attitudes.

***Figures 2 and3 here*** While levels of religiosity do not appear to significantly affect gender patterns of radical right support (in both cases, the PTV scores decrease at highest levels of religiosity -figure not reported), social economic insecurity and exclusion from labour force does seem to alter the gender balance in this respect. In the 2014 EES questionnaires, our best proxies are such occupational conditions as "manual worker"

(whether skilled or unskilled) and "non active" out of work respondents (i.e. homemaker, unemployed or temporarily not working). We thus isolate these two employment statuses from the rest of the sample ("Else").

Figure 3 shows that the gender gap is neutralized, and tends even to be reversed, among non-actives (value above the zero line indicates women supporting the RR more than men, although the gap is not statistically significant here), whereas it is reinforced among manual workers (1.0). In both cases, however, women's support for the radical right is higher than their average score (2.1) (the score among non-active women is 2.7, among manual works 2.8). But it is among non-actives that women's position appears most noteworthy, firstly because they even tend to score higher then men, secondly because they account for two thirds of this occupational category.

Among manual workers, on the contrary, men are not only more numerous (68%), but also much more strongly supporting the radical right (3.8). As mentioned in section 1, this could be associated with norms of masculinity permeating blue collars milieus and reflecting an "angry white men" basis for RR support.

Overall, non-active workers provide an excellent example of "equal support" across gender, i.e. RR support with no gender gap. Manual workers, on the contrary, fit the cell of "traditional support", or traditional gender gap in support for radical right parties.

***Figure 4 here*** If the societal dimension matters in this respect, intra-gender variations of the RRGG also depend on ideological and policy-related factors. Table 1 has already shown that the latter are strongly associated with voting for radical right parties, but also that they partly mediate the radical right gender gap, which disappears when gender compositional differences in terms of left-right ideology, attitudes toward migration and homosexuality are all simultaneously accounted for. We now test possible interactions of gender and ideology first, gender and policy-related attitudes secondly, on patterns of support for the radical right. This follows our theoretical expectationoutlined in the "four-cell" table -whereby political attitudes should differently affect different categories of women and men voters in their levels of RR support, consistent with the idea that both a "modern" and a "traditional" gender gap contribute to explaining gender-based attitudes toward radical right parties.

*** Figures 5a and5b here *** First, is ideology differently moderating RR support across gender? A clearly significant interaction coefficient (p=0.008, table not reported) suggests that this is the case. Figure 4 presents the estimated marginal effects of left-right self-placement on RR support conditional on gender, as drawn from interaction model 3 (see Appendix A). As it turns out, levels of support for RR parties differ across gender at the right but not at the left of the ideological scale. The average PTV score for RR parties is, for instance, 0.69 points lower among women than men voters positioning themselves at the extreme right of the scale (position 10), but it does not significantly differ across gender within positions 0 to 4 (center-left). Therefore, the effect of gender on RR support is moderated by ideology, in that women placing themselves at the radical right appear to be less assertive than men in their propensities to vote for radical right parties. In our theoretical framework (four-cell table), this stands for a "traditional" pattern of RR support, with right-wing women less disposed to support radical right parties and more favorable to established conservative parties.

In addition, histograms in Figure 4 We finally test interactions of gender with the two policy-related attitudes that proved most strongly associated with RR support, namely migration and same-sex marriage.

Both figures 5a and 5b show very similar patterns of gender-policies interactions, which tend to replicate what we have already observed about left-right ideology. The RRGG is highest among voters who are more hostile to policies favoring immigrants and homosexuals, whereas it disappears among those with the most tolerant stances (positions 7 to 10 for migration, positions 0 to 1 for same-sex marriage) on these issues. Once again, not only are men slightly more radical in their positioning with respect to these issues (see histograms for positions 0 to 3 in figure 5a, for position 10 -especially when compared with position 0 -in figure 5b), they are clearly more supportive of radical right parties when they take these "tougher" stances. Conversely, women who most clearly affirm their tolerance vis-à-vis social outgroups do not differ from men in their firm rejection of the radical right (PTV scores close to 0 for the migration issue, around 1.6 for the moral issue). Hence, we obtain once again a twofold picture in relation to the radical right gender gap: on the one side, disappearance of the gender gap in the presence of left-wing and more tolerant political positioning ("equal rejection"); on the other side, permanence of the radical right gender gap as a result of "traditional support" based on a mix of higher male ideological 'toughness' and lower women's political assertiveness.

Conclusion

A broad picture results from this analysis of voters' support for six European radical right parties. It suggests that, consistent with previous findings in recent decades [START_REF] Betz | Radical right wing populism in Western Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Givens | The Radical Right Gender Gap[END_REF][START_REF] Immerzeel | Explaining the gender gap in radical right voting: a cross national investigation in 12 Western European countries[END_REF], a Radical Right Gender Gap (RRGG) exists, with women significantly less likely than men to support RR parties.

Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, this gap appears relatively mild (if translated in electoral terms, roughly 4-5 percentage points at the most). And given that women account for some 53 percent of the electorate in general, one should keep in mind that in spite of the RRGG, there are as many if not more women than men in RR electorates.

Above and beyond the broad picture, however, this paper has first investigated the compositional bases of the RRGG and found that this gap does not depend on education-and religion-related gender differences between men and women voters;

secondly, it has identified the fundamental mediators of the RRGP, i.e. ideological and political attitudes that logically precede electoral support. In particular, left-right self-placement and attitudes toward immigrants and homosexuality have emerged as the main factors that mediate between gender and vote, with the gender gap losing all significance when they are simultaneously held constant.

Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, our paper has demonstrated that at least two patterns lie behind the general idea of "radical right gender gap". Indeed, when the RRGG is there, it can have two opposite meanings across different intra-gender categories of voters. On the one hand, it implies relatively high levels of support for radical right parties, but even higher support among men. On the other hand, it involves clear rejection of the radical right, but even clearer rejection among women.

In the first case ("Traditional support", according to the theoretical framework outlined in the four-cell table), the explanation is compositional in ideological terms (i.e. women are less often on the right of the ideological spectrum and tend to be more tolerant than men vis-à-vis social outgroups), but rests also on a different -i.e. lower -women's propensity to turn right-wing attitudes into explicit support for the radical right. In other words, women tend to "agree" less -although, admittedly, only slightly less -than men with the ideological and political stances of radical right parties, but even when they do agree, they are less willing to support these parties. Hence, and consistent with what other researchers have found in relation to the 2009 EP election and across a more heterogeneous group of populist radical right parties (Harteveld et al., 2015), one may also conclude that political attitudes -namely, political attitudes that are less assertive and less "tough" among women -both mediate and moderate the relationship between gender and RR voting.

Conversely, in the second pattern ("Modern rejection") women appear to be at least as categorical as men in refusing the radical right. The explanation for this apparent paradox -co-presence of "modern" and "traditional" patterns of gender gap -is in truth very simple, and rests on the idea of intra-gender heterogeneity, with women appearing particularly split along societal and ideological lines [START_REF] Dimaggio | Have Americans' social attitudes become more polarized?[END_REF][START_REF] Campbell | Gender and the Vote in Britain: beyond the Gender Gap? Colchester[END_REF][START_REF] Gidengil | Beyond the gender Gap[END_REF][START_REF] Barisione | Debunking the myth of a "Traditional" gender gap in the electoral support for Silvio Berlusconi in Italy (1994-2013[END_REF]. If we consider the similar cases of "modern rejection" and "equal rejection" together, what we are confronted with is the ideal type of a younger highly-educated left-wing woman who clearly does not lack assertiveness in contrasting the radical right, and who is very far from the profile of the woman on which the traditional RRGG rests -i.e. older, less-educated, more religious and politically conservative. In addition, a third type of woman, characterized essentially by socioeconomic insecurity and exclusion from the labour force, tends to assimilate men's inclination to vote for a radical right party ("Equal support").

Although we have not found cross-country clues for the hypothesis that the erosion of the RRGG is associated with a normalization strategy pursued by some RR parties, the comparative perspective was admittedly marginal in our research design, whereby ensuring inter-party homogeneity was more important than enlarging the number of cases. The longitudinal dimension was also missing in this paper, and should be incorporated in an enlarged research design including all of the waves of the European Election Studies at least since 1989.

As for the dependent variable, we maintain that the PTV (propensities to vote) score is particularly suitable to study the structure of attitudes and patterns of behaviors toward radical right parties in Europe, given both the often too small number of observations referencing actual votes for these parties and the overall reliability, as shown in section 2, of these scores as measures of electoral support. A further step would be to test our findings on actual voting for the RR, drawing from national electoral surveys.

Figure 1

The effect of gender on the propensities to vote (PTVs) for RR parties by country Note: each point indicates the relative gender gap (men's score minus women's score) on the 0-10 PTV scale, and corresponds to the estimated coefficient (slope) drawn from four mixedeffects (random intercept and slopes) multilevel models (basic, societal, political and policyrelated).

Figures 2 and 3

Marginal effects of Education and Employment on RR support conditional on gender (women voters) (with 95% confidence intervals) (see interaction models 1 and 2) national sovereignty to public spending, from crime to environmental issues. For the sake of parsimony, we decided to focus only on the two issues that emerged from the multivariate analysis as the most strongly associated with voting for radical parties. Flemish Interest

  further in testing the socio-political bases of the radical right gender gap. To do so, it investigates whether the RRGG depends on different gender compositions in terms of actual turnout at the 2014 EP election, of political interest and of distribution on the left-right ideological axis. While participation in the European election makes a barely significant difference on the support of the radical right (which slightly tends to decrease among actual voters in 2014), a more important role is played by political interest (the higher the interest in politics, the lower the chances to vote for a radical right party) and, much expectedly, by left-right selfplacement: as the latter gets closer to the far-right pole by one unit, the average PTV score increases by more than 0.4 points, all else being held constant. But even in this case -including these political control variables -the radical right gender gap remains fully significant, even though substantively reduced (from 0.46 to 0.33 average points).

  Figure1shows the same results (magnitude of RRGG by each model) across countries. Patterns of gender gap do change, of course, across countries. In the basic model, the gap is of about 0.6 points in France and Denmark, but it dos not reach 0.4 points in Sweden and Belgium. Moreover, decrease of the gender gap in the support of the National Front is linear as we proceed from model 0 to model 3, whereas the pattern appears to be "flatter" for other countries.

  provide the actual distribution of left-right selfplacement across gender. This reminds us another fundamental element: in 2014, European women lean, on average, more to the left than to the right or, alternativelyand consistently with persisting lower assertiveness in politics -prefer to position themselves at the center of the ideological spectrum, not choosing between left and right. Hence, to correctly understand the relationship between gender, ideology and voting, one should keep these three elements in mind: women voters are (1) less often on the right than men (modern gender gap); (2) they are more often on the center (lower political assertiveness); (3) when positioned on the right, they are less prone to express support for the RR parties (traditional radical right gender gap). While the first two elements are compositional in nature, the third points to a moderating effect of ideology in predicting gender-based patterns of RR support, with men's greater propensity to vote for these parties having a clearer radical right connotation.

Figure 4

 4 Figure 4Marginal effects of left-right self-placement on RR support conditional on gender (women voters) (with 95% confidence intervals) (see interaction model 3)

  Therefore our choice went to the European Election Studies, and for the most recent election, 2014, all the more interesting to study as the Radical Rights did very good scores (over one quarter for the Danish People's Party, the French FN, the British UKIP). We chose to limit ourselves to six well-established "radical right populist parties" 5 in Europe that are clearly positioned on the right side of a 0-10 left-right scale by public opinions in their countries. We excluded other potentially relevant parties that are less congruent with a radical right ideology, such as the Northern League and True Finns. We excluded Eastern Europe countries as well, because of the specificity of the post-communist context. The selection of cases presents contrasted features, in that the scores of these parties in the EP election range between 26.6 For this reason, our methodological strategy consists of constructing a single measure of support for radical right parties across the six countries, i.e. a unique dependent variable resulting from the aggregation of voting probabilities for each national party. , to properly analyze the RR gender gap and its relationship with other social and political factors it is safer to turn to a continuous measure of party support such as the propensity to vote (PTV) score. This variable indicates the self-assessed

	Thereforedegree of probability (on a 0-10 scale) that each respondent "will ever vote" for a RR
	party, where '0' means "not at all probable" and '10' means "very probable". Using
	this variable, the number of respondents for each RR party increases from a minimum
	of 580 (Vlaams Belang) to a maximum of 1114 cases (Sweden Democrats) (see
	Appendix table 3).
	Immerzeel, Coffé, and van der Lippe, 2013; Norris, 2005; Rippeyoung, 2007), it is
	usually on the basis of large cross-national surveys (European Values Study,
	European Social Survey, World Values Survey) that are not fit to such a purpose and
	result into a distorted image of actual votes for such parties. The reason for this is the Lastly, we opted for voting probabilities rather than for actual votes, since even in
	non-electoral nature of these surveys, which collect voting intentions or past votes in specifically comparative electoral surveys like the EES (European Election Studies),
	the next or last national election, but outside the context of a real election (Banducci the number of self-reported radical right voters is often too small to permit any

Some just acknowledge the gap based on cross tabulations comparing the level of electoral support of these parties by gender and by country, sometimes only at one point in time, not controlling for the possible effect of other variables. When they do attempt systematic controls (for instance

[START_REF] Banducci | Surveys in Context: How Timing in the Electoral Cycle Influences Response Propensity and Satisficing[END_REF]

. Moreover, the country subsamples are usually small, resulting into very small numbers of self-reported far-right voters, a tendency that is further aggravated by moral reprobation being still attached to support for many of these parties.

percent for the Danish People's Party to 4.3 for the Flemish Interest (see Appendix table

1

). Some of these parties are also perceived as more extremist than others. If one compares their average score on an 11-point left-right scale (0-10), the French FN comes ahead with a peak score of 8.8, while the Danish People's Party gets only 7.4

(see Appendix table 2).

However, in spite of their relative differences, these six parties undoubtedly belong to the same line of the "Radical Right" in contemporary Europe (2015, Kallis) and are suitable, as such, for an aggregate study of the radical right gender gap. Hence, this study aims to test and explain the European radical right gender gap altogether -i.e. with a 'pooled' approach -rather than to seize 'in-country' specificities. statistical analysis. In this 2014 EES survey, for instance, in spite of the high score of the National Front at the EP election (25%), the number of self-reported NF voters amounts to 58 (16%, see Appendix table 1).

Not only does this variable present the clear advantage of a much larger number of cases, it also proves to be a very good proxy for real vote choices. We draw this conclusion from two statistical tests. First, appendix table 3 presents the average PTV score by vote choice at the 2014 EP election (RR party voters vs. other voters). In all cases, propensities to vote for RR parties always exceed the average score '8' on the 0-10 scale among RR party voters, with a clear homogeneity across countries.

Table 1 .

 1 Parameter estimates (coefficients with standard errors in parentheses) of four different mixed-effects multilevel regression models predicting the propensities to vote for radical Right parties

		Model 0	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
		(Basic)	(Societal)	(Political)	(Policy)
	Gender (Man/woman)	-0.455***	-0.453***	-0.333***	-0.146
		(0.12)	(0.10)	(0.09)	(0.11)
	Age		-0.016***	-0.017***	-0.025***
			(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)
	Education (1=lower; 3=higher)		-0.741***	-0.598***	-0.425***
			(0.06)	(0.06)	(0.06)
	Religion (Church attendance		-0.062**	-0.103***	-0.120***
	0=never; 7=weekly)
			(0.02)	(0.02)	(0.02)
	Voted at EP 2014 (No/yes)			-0.215*	-0.121
				(0.10)	(0.09)
	Political Interest (1=low; 4=high)			-0.231***	-0.116**
				(0.05)	(0.04)
	Left-Right ideology (0-10)			0.428***	0.307***
				(0.02)	(0.02)
	Immigration (against restrictive				-0.318***
	policy) (0-10)
					(0.01)
	Oppose same-sex marriage (0-				0.106***
	10)
					(0.01)
	Intercept	2.939***	5.704***	3.949***	5.103***
		(0.42)	(0.48)	(0.46)	(0.47)
	Random-effect parameters:
	Gender (std. dev.)	0.188	0.145	0.080	0.178
	Gender (std. err.)	0.116	0.124	0.156	0.103
	Intercept (std. dev.)	0.983	0.979	0.910	0.949
	Intercept (std. err.)	0.309	0.318	0.302	0.301
	N	5853	5853	5853	5853
	p	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
	Log Likelihood	-15221.393	-15138.88	-14793.73	-14485.809
	aic	30452.787	30293.761	29609.460	28997.618
	Significance levels: *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001

For a close yet slightly different definition of the « moderating » and « mediating » effects explaining the RRGG also see[START_REF] Harteveld | The gender gap in populist radical-right voting: examining the demand side in Western and Eastern Europe[END_REF].

We refer in this paper to the definition of the populist radical right parties given by Cas Mudde, based on nativism, authoritarianism and populism(Mudde, 2007, p.19).

In the EES 2014 dataset a set of other relevant policy-related variables are available -from

APPENDIX Appendix A

Interaction model 1

All models, which have the PTV (propensities to vote) score for RR party as the dependent variable, are mixed-effects multilevel models with varying intercepts and slopes (for gender) for group indicator j (country).

Appendix Table 1

Vote choice for radical right parties in the 2014 EES sample and at 2014 EP election. Appendix Figure 1 Percentage distribution of 0-10 PTV scores by each RR party and gender

1 For a good introduction to the debate see the special issue of Patterns of prejudice, on Gender and populist radical rights politics, especially the opening paper (Spierings, Zaslove, Mügge & de Lange, 2015 and in the same issue Mudde, Kaltwasser).

2 For an interesting approach of the contrasted reaction of women to the use of torture in the post 9/11 context, of the impact of feminism and motherhood, see Wemlinger, 2013.

3 See for instance the comparative analysis conducted at OFCE [START_REF] Eydoux | Special Issue of Revue de l'OFCE « European labour Markets in Times of Crisis. A Gender Perspective[END_REF] showing how the recession first had an impact on men and then on women, from "hecession to she-austerity".


Alice Simon

How can we explain the gender gap in children's political knowledge?

How can we explain the gender gap in children's political knowledge?

Introduction

The unequal distribution of political knowledge among citizens has become a wellestablished fact in political science. Various studies have shown that the level of political knowledge is correlated with variables such as the level of education, socioeconomic status, age, and gender (see for example [START_REF] Converse | The nature of belief systems in mass publics[END_REF]Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1993;[START_REF] Gaxie | Le cens caché[END_REF]Gaxie, , 1996;;Mondak & Davis 2001, etc.). The gender gap is one of the main puzzles explored in research on political knowledge. In most studies men score far higher than women on knowledge tests, especially on questions that involve naming politicians or that cover national political news [START_REF] Dolan | Do Women and Men Know Different Things? Measuring Gender Differences in Political Knowledge[END_REF]Fraile, 2013, etc.). This gap is generally considered to be a legacy of the patriarchal culture in our societies, long based on a gendered division of labor in which only men were in charge of public affairs. Having internalized what remains of these gender roles, women tend to be less interested in politics and less concerned about their country's government. If this explanation is correct, recent social changes towards greater gender equality should be expected to reduce the gender gap in political knowledge, especially for the youngest generations, who are most affected by these changes [START_REF] Hahn | Gender and political learning[END_REF][START_REF] Fraile | Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge in Europe[END_REF].

Studies with children therefore provide a way to measure the impact of cultural developments on the gender gap in political knowledge. More broadly, studying children is conducive to better understanding the origins of knowledge inequalities. Indeed, as Piaget said "when only considering the adult, we only perceive already-formed mechanisms, while when following children's development, we witness formation, and only formation is explanatory" (1972, p.139, author's translation). Observing children is a means to understand what happens at the very beginning of political socialization, and thus to study the foundation of political cognition. The field of childhood political socialization has produced several studies on political knowledge, although most of them were published in the heyday of this field of research, in the '60s and '70s (see for example [START_REF] Easton | The Child's Political World[END_REF][START_REF] Landes | Political socialization among youth: A comparative study of English-Canadian and American school children[END_REF][START_REF] Langton | The relative influence of the family, peer group and school in the development of political efficacy[END_REF]. The studies that focused on gender systematically found knowledge gaps in children's political efficacy: young girls tended to be less interested in politics, to be less attentive to political information, and to be less knowledgeable about their government, their country's political history and ways to influence government [START_REF] Applebee | Literature & U.S. History: The instructional experience and factual knowledge of high school juniors[END_REF][START_REF] Dowse | Girls, boys, and politics[END_REF][START_REF] Greenstein | Children and politics[END_REF][START_REF] Hess | The development of political attitudes in children[END_REF][START_REF] Owen | Gender differences in the politicization of American children[END_REF]. A number of studies have addressed this issue more recently, pondering the effects of social change on the gender gap [START_REF] Baldi | What Democracy Means to Ninth Graders: U.S. Results from the International IEA Civic Education Study[END_REF][START_REF] Milner | The Political Knowledge and Political Participation of Young Canadians and Americans[END_REF][START_REF] Ferrin-Pereira | Young and gapped? Political knowledge of girls and boys in Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Torney-Purta | Cross-national research in social studies[END_REF][START_REF] Van Deth | Children and Politics: An Empirical Reassessment of Early Political Socialization[END_REF][START_REF] Wolak | The Roots of the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge in Adolescence[END_REF]. A few changes in gendered political socialization were identified: in several studies, girls showed equal interest in politics and concern about national affairs [START_REF] Torney-Purta | Cross-national research in social studies[END_REF][START_REF] Hahn | Gender and political learning[END_REF]. Yet all the studies including cognitive scales still found a gender gap in the political knowledge of children and adolescents on at least some of the test questions. How can the gender gap in children's political knowledge be explained? This article presents the results of an empirical study on French children, providing a means to test the leading explanations for the gender gap cited in the literature. After a brief presentation of the theoretical framework and empirical data, each section of the article will explore one of three possible explanations of the gender gap in children's political knowledge: the situational explanation, the socialization explanation and the methodological explanation.

Theoretical Framework

This article focuses on a narrow conception of political knowledge, which is defined as the possession of a body of factual knowledge about the political sphere. Political knowledge in this sense can be analytically separated into three elements: an understanding of the political system and democratic mechanisms; an appreciation of political duties and of the figures and groups performing them; and a general grasp of the political context, including awareness of major political events, ideas and cleavages (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1993;[START_REF] Luskin | Re(:)Measuring Political Sophistication[END_REF]. Three classical explanations for the gender gap appear in the literature [START_REF] Fraile | Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge in Europe[END_REF], and this study tests each one in relation to children.

First, the gender gap can be seen as a result of situation. Indeed, women tend to have lower social and economic status and fewer responsibilities, and all these characteristics are correlated with a lower level of political knowledge (see for example Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1993;[START_REF] Gaxie | Le cens caché[END_REF]. Moreover, even when controlling for socioeconomic status, women tend to have more domestic duties, and therefore fewer opportunities to become informed about politics [START_REF] Fraile | Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge in Europe[END_REF]. This explanation implies that the gender knowledge gap results from social inequalities. However, these should not affect children in primary school, where all children share the same status of being pupils and no particular social inequalities disproportionately affect either young girls or boys. Major disparities exist in children's socioeconomic and cultural environments, but there are no correlations between these variables and gender during childhood: at this stage, girls have neither a lower socioeconomic status nor a lower educational level than boys. Children are therefore a sample in which particular life circumstances are roughly similar across the genders.

Hypothesis 1: If the situational explanation is the main factor in the gender gap, there should be no differences in the political knowledge of young girls and boys.

Second, the gender gap can be considered a result of socialization. Educational practices and collective beliefs about gender roles might lead children to adopt different attitudes and behaviors, including a different perception of politics. Even though social change has generally reduced gender inequalities in the domestic and political realms, a diffuse representation of gender roles still associates public affairs with men, and women with domestic matters [START_REF] Francis | Investigating Gender: Contemporary Perspectives in Education[END_REF]. Consequently, men tend to be more knowledgeable about politics than women, although in some sub-areas (such as local affairs) women's scores are equal or even better than those of men [START_REF] Dolan | Do Women and Men Know Different Things? Measuring Gender Differences in Political Knowledge[END_REF][START_REF] Shaker | Local Political Knowledge and Assessment of Citizen Competence[END_REF][START_REF] Fraile | Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge in Europe[END_REF]. The knowledge gap could then be explained by the fact that the knowledge tests focus on men's interests [START_REF] Ferrin-Pereira | Young and gapped? Political knowledge of girls and boys in Europe[END_REF]. This socialization effect could shape political knowledge at the very beginning of political socialization, since gender identification takes root in early childhood. Yet the impact of gender socialization should become increasingly apparent in the results of knowledge tests as the children grow older and accumulate knowledge. Indeed, regardless of gender, all children are born without any political knowledge, but reach adulthood with unequal levels of knowledge. The impact of gender socialization on political knowledge is therefore a progressive process.

Hypothesis 2: If the socialization explanation is the main factor in the gender gap, different scores should be expected for girls and boys, and the difference should be greater for older children and variable depending on the questions.

Finally, the gender gap can be interpreted as a result of survey methods. Women tend to answer test questions in a way that significantly decreases their scores in comparison to men, who take more risks and are more self-confident [START_REF] Ben-Shakhar | Gender Difference in Multiple-Choice Tests: the Role of Differential Guessing Tendencies[END_REF][START_REF] Fraile | Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge in Europe[END_REF]Mondak & Davis, 2004). The risk aversion of women, who fear selecting the wrong answer, pushes them to select the "don't know" option more often than men, whose scores are thereby inflated since they are more likely to randomly select the correct answer. These question answering behaviors are a consequence of gender personality development, which starts early in life.

Hypothesis 3: If the methodological explanation plays a role in the gender gap, it should affect children's knowledge test scores.

Empirical Data

The study was conducted from spring 2014 through spring 2015 at six schools in a midsized French town 1 . 369 pupils in 21 different classes, between the ages of eight and eleven (classes CE2, CM1 and CM2), received questionnaires that they individually completed during class time. Efforts were made to select schools as diverse as possible with regard to their location (suburb, city-center) and the socioeconomic status of their pupils 2 . The questionnaire included several sections. First, children were asked about their family, habits, socioeconomic background, etc.; next they were asked a variety of opinion questions; then they had to complete a knowledge test; at the end they were asked to assess the questionnaire.

The knowledge test consisted of three types of questions. The children were asked to recognize and name some political figures in pictures, then to complete a series of multiplechoice questions on political figures, parties and institutions, and finally to answer a few open-ended questions (for more details, see a translation of the knowledge test in the appendix). This survey design enabled measurement of children's political knowledge on different issues and according to variables such as socioeconomic features, age and, most importantly for this study, gender.

Is there a Gender Gap in Children's Political Knowledge?

The children's scores on the political knowledge test varied widely. Many children answered only a few questions correctly, while others knew almost all the answers. A series of regression analyses were performed to identify the main determinants of political knowledge. The regression model presented in Table 1 only includes the variables with the greatest explanatory power, in order to underscore the relative importance of gender (see a detailed description of the variables in Appendix 2). The results reveal a gender gap in children's political knowledge, although gender is far from being the main determinant of political knowledge in childhood.

Table 1. Factors of Political Knowledge (linear regression)

2 In each participating school, efforts were made to include as many pupils as possible in the study, as long as teachers and parents agreed. Children below eight years old (CE2 year) were not included because of their generally insufficient reading and writing skills. Moreover, age can also be considered a marker of a social position: as children grow older, they are increasingly socially expected to be knowledgeable about different issues. The results confirm that this stage of life is crucial for the acquisition of political knowledge [START_REF] Connell | Child's construction of politics[END_REF][START_REF] Percheron | La socialisation politique; textes réunis et présentés par Nonna Mayer et Anne Muxel[END_REF]. Political knowledge is also determined by children's academic competence (.202***), assessed on the basis of their teacher's evaluation of their educational achievement. This implies that conditions and provisions that help develop academic competence also develop political competence, probably partly because both are linked to sociocultural inequalities and parents' educational practices, and partly because children with a higher level may be more curious and have better memory skills. Political knowledge is also shaped by children's social background (.175***)the more privileged the environment, the more knowledgeable the children -as well as by the family's level of politicization (.245***) 3 . Finally, of most relevance to this study, gender is a significant factor, but its role is limited in comparison with other variables (.095*). Hypothesis 1 is therefore invalid: if the gender gap begins as early as childhood, then it cannot be explained only by specific differences in the social positions of men and women, since these differences only appear later in life.

Variable

Overall, these results are congruent with the results of knowledge tests in other countries [START_REF] Baldi | What Democracy Means to Ninth Graders: U.S. Results from the International IEA Civic Education Study[END_REF][START_REF] Van Deth | Children and Politics: An Empirical Reassessment of Early Political Socialization[END_REF]: the main determinants of political knowledge are similar. To some degree, these results are also similar to findings for adults in 3 The family's level of politicization is determined on the basis of children's statements about political media consumption and political discussions at home. France and abroad [START_REF] Chiche | Les connaissances politiques[END_REF][START_REF] Delli Carpini | What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters[END_REF][START_REF] Perrineau | Les français et la connaissance du système politique[END_REF].

The main difference to adult studies is that many variables cannot be tested on children (for example their level of education, their occupation or their voter turnout): since all children share the same status as pupils, their social position can only be defined by their social environment (their area of residence and their family). Furthermore, the age variable is more important for children than for adults. Indeed, political knowledge is acquired progressively throughout the political socialization process, and at this very early stage every year makes a difference. The gender variable appears to be weaker for children than for adults. This might be because of the progressive impact of gender socialization on the gender gap in children's political knowledge.

Is Gender Socialization the Main Explanatory Factor for the Gender Gap?

Gender socialization is a lifelong process, but its effect is especially strong in childhood and adolescence, because individuals develop gender identity at this stage of life.

Children are born without any gender identification, but most of them reach adulthood having completely internalized their gender roles, which shows that social norms regarding gender are transmitted early in life [START_REF] Francis | Investigating Gender: Contemporary Perspectives in Education[END_REF]. As a result, gender-specific political socialization should be expected as soon as children become aware of politics. Moreover, its effect on knowledge tests should become increasingly salient as children grow older and develop political efficacy. Owen and Dennis (1988, p.35), who found that "gender distinctions in politicization become more pronounced as pre-adults enter adolescence; a time when they are approaching the age when they are able to become more overtly politically active". This seems to confirm hypothesis 2, according to which the gender gap is a consequence of gender socialization. Indeed, gender socialization has a progressive impact on identification and attitudes throughout childhood.

Another argument in favor of the socialization explanation of the gender gap is the existence of sub-fields of political knowledge. Several studies have shown that depending on the content of questions women do not always score lower than men (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1993;[START_REF] Ferrin-Pereira | Young and gapped? Political knowledge of girls and boys in Europe[END_REF]. For example, women are equally knowledgeable about practical areas of political activity (such as government benefits and services; [START_REF] Stolle | What do Women Really Know? A Gendered Analysis of Varieties of Political Knowledge[END_REF] and about local politics [START_REF] Shaker | Local Political Knowledge and Assessment of Citizen Competence[END_REF]. Table 3 shows that girls scored lower than boys on the test, but that they did not score lower on all the questions. (1) ascending order (2) multiple-choice question (DK) option, which may lead to an overestimation of the gender gap in political knowledge.

Indeed, when the DK option is eliminated from tests, encouraging respondents to guess, the gap narrows significantly. According to Mondak "the evidence suggests that the tendency of men to provide substantive answers rather than DKs possibly inflates their knowledge scores by a margin large enough to account for approximately half of the observed gender gap" (Mondak & Anderson, 2004, p.503). However, other studies have challenged these results by finding that guessing strategies did not significantly affect results since the DK option generally did not hide knowledge but rather revealed respondents' true ignorance, so that encouraging guesses yielded similar results as assigning random answers to DKs (Ben-Shakhar & Sinai 1991; [START_REF] Westle | Effects of Measurement-Variants on the Record of Political Knowledge[END_REF].

In order to test the methodological bias hypothesis on children this study included an experiment inspired by Mondak's work: half of the questionnaires included "don't know" boxes for each multiple-choice question, while the other half did not include any DK boxes and explicitly asked the children to guess when they did not know the answer6 . This enabled the measurement of the propensity to guess, and the assessment of its impact on the results of this part of the test7 . The first element that indicates gender disparities in the way children answer the knowledge test is the number of omissions. Table 4 shows that girls refrained from guessing twice as often as boys when the DK option was not provided (2.161*). Moreover, when the DK option was provided, girls chose it more frequently (2.150*). This reluctance to guess can partly be explained by an objective difference in political knowledge: because girls are less politically aware, they tend to declare themselves incompetent more often. However, a closer look at the results suggests that this gap is also due to different answering strategies: boys take more risks than girls. Indeed, when the DK option was provided, they made more mistakes than girls (-1.855*). The implication is that when children are unsure of the correct answer, girls tend not to answer while boys tend to guess, as seen in the literature on adults [START_REF] Mondak | The knowledge gap: A reexamination of gender-based differences in political knowledge[END_REF][START_REF] Fraile | Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge in Europe[END_REF]. This risk-taking strategy should increase boys' chances of selecting the right answer, either randomly or through guessing. Yet it does not significantly change the overall results.

Indeed, removing the DK option and encouraging guesses did not significantly increase girls' scores compared to the increase in boys' scores. On the contrary, the difference between girls and boys was slightly more pronounced without the DKs (-1.406 with DKs, and -1.628

without)

The explanation is that even when they are encouraged to guess, many girls still prefer to refrain from answering than to take a risk, once again creating an advantage for boys. If an artificial situation is set up whereby a random answer is assigned to each omission when DKs are not provided, as shown in Table 5, the gender gap narrows compared to the scenario in which the test includes DKs. Table 5 indicates that if the children were forced to guess (which is not actually possible in a pen-and-pencil questionnaire) the gender gap would slightly narrow. The inclusion of DKs therefore does penalize girls, because they decide to refrain from answering more often, and this strategy makes them lose a one-out-of-three chance of randomly

selecting the right answer. However, in the case of this questionnaire, there was no major difference between the tests including DKs and the artificial situation presented above. When the DK option was removed, girls' percentage of correct answers increased by approximately the expected score for guessing. These results suggest that when girls choose the DK option it is generally because they truly do not know the answer to the question, and that there is no hidden knowledge behind the DK response. In other words, there are no or few differences between the answering strategy of a boy and that of a girl when s/he is informed or partly informed. In such cases all children pick the answer they think is correct. Differences appear when they are completely uninformed. In this case, girls tend to choose the DK box and are reluctant to guess, even if encouraged to do so, while boys tend to guess, as demonstrated by their greater tendency to answer incorrectly. These results suggest that the gender difference in response strategies is due less to girls' risk aversion, and more to boys' DK aversion.

Hypothesis 3 therefore cannot be validated: guessing does not significantly change the results. Although these findings indicate that the gender gap is not due to a survey effect, they do show that girls and boys do not answer questionnaires in the same way. This is not just a potential methodological bias, but also an indicator of gender differences in test-taking behavior that seems to be a direct consequence of gender socialization.

What if these Methodological Issues were also a Consequence of Socialization?

The tendency to guess can be considered a result of gender socialization. During childhood, the diffusion of social norms might be "inviting men to shout out the answers" while encouraging women to "sit in the back and keep quiet" (Mondak, 2004, p. 493).

Because of tacit representations of gender roles, boys learn to take more risks, are encouraged to show off their abilities and discouraged from admitting they do not know something, while girls learn to be cautious and tend to feel less confident in their answers [START_REF] Simon | Niveau de connaissance, genre et capital de confiance: étude expérimentale sur les connaissances politiques des étudiant-e-s[END_REF]. These gender characteristics influence the way girls and boys take knowledge tests, in terms of level of confidence, risk aversion and DK aversion. Moreover, children probably develop different perceptions of knowledge itself. Boys may feel it is their duty to be in possession of a set of factual knowledge and therefore feel ashamed if they do not know something, while girls may be more comfortable admitting ignorance. The development of a sense of legitimacy therefore differs for girls and boys (Bourdieu, 1977). From a psychological point of view, this difference in the attitudes of men and women towards knowledge tests can be interpreted as the result of a stereotype threatnegative stereotypes about women's efficacy might undermine their performance on knowledge tests [START_REF] Mcglone | Stereotype Threat and the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge[END_REF].

These hypotheses can partly be verified through the analysis of a question at the end of the knowledge test which asked children to assess the difficulty of the questionnaire. The results presented in Table 6 show that at equal levels of knowledge the probability of finding the test easy is mainly predicted by gender. Gender therefore affects the way children approach tests. By declaring that they consider the test to be easy, boys are declaring themselves competent, whether or not they are.

There may be a link between this perception of the test and the propensity to guess: if boys think that the test is easy, they are probably confident in their ability to answer all the questions, which should encourage them to guess in cases of uncertainty. Conversely, girls tend to find the test difficult, which encourages them to admit ignorance and choose the DK option. This is a result of socialization: social norms encourage boys to feel confident and knowledgeable. Therefore, what is generally seen as a methodological bias (the propensity to guess) can itself be considered a result, indicating different attitudes towards test taking and revealing a self-confidence gap. In turn, these differences might push boys to further acquire knowledge: because they feel more competent and more legitimate, they might feel more comfortable talking about politics, opening opportunities for them to learn new information.

Moreover, if they feel they are expected to be knowledgeable, they might make greater efforts, consciously or not, to learn more about politics. A new hypothesis worth exploring is whether the self-confidence gap is partly responsible for the knowledge gap.

Conclusion

This study is based on a relatively small group or respondents (N=369), who all live in the same town. National or international surveys would be needed in order to provide more precise and complete data on children's political knowledge. This study did not pretend to provide such data: it must rather be considered as a case study, aiming to interrogate the explanations of the gender gap in children's political knowledge. Although limited in scope, it contributes to confirming that the gender gap in political knowledge takes root in childhood.

Consequently, the "situational explanation" (according to which the gender gap in political knowledge results from social inequalities in the occupations of men and women) alone cannot explain the existence of the gender gap, since all children have the same occupation: being pupils. Rather, the study's findings indicate that the gender gap is a consequence of gender socialization. As they grow older, girls and boys progressively develop different perceptions of their roles according to their gender, which in turn increasingly affects their political efficacy. Indeed, the older the children, the stronger the impact of these socialization effects, so that the gap becomes increasingly salient over the years. Moreover, the gap varies depending on the issues. Girls score as well as boys on some questions, such as those on local politics and on women, but score much lower on questions involving international politics or male politicians. This has been interpreted as a sign that the gender gap results from the internalization of gender roles: certain sub-areas of political knowledge are socially considered to more or less fall within women's sphere of competence, thereby shaping their interest in the information and their efforts to remember it. Finally, the gender gap measured here does not appear to result from a methodological bias: the experimental design showed that boys do take more risks than girls, but that this strategy only accounts for a small part of the gender gap. However, these findings point to gender differences in social behavior that stem from another aspect of gender socialization: girls and boys develop different attitudes towards test taking and towards knowledge in general. Further studies are needed to measure the impact of factors such as self-confidence on the acquisition of political knowledge.

Indeed, it appears that gender socialization affects children's political knowledge both directly, through the diffusion of social norms regarding politics, and indirectly, through the internalization of attitudes towards tests and towards knowledge. The test included 17 questions overall (see Appendix 1), but the knowledge scale used above is a grade out of 15: two pairs of questions (those on François Hollande and Manuel Valls) were awarded 1 point for the pair (0.5 points for each question) because they addressed a single knowledge item. This study refers to the class children are enrolled in, with each class corresponding to an age group based on birth year. This measure is not precise regarding children's biological age, as a small part of the children repeated or skipped a year.

(1) Gender [nominal variable]

Children were asked their gender in the questionnaire.

Academic competence [ordinal variable]

Teachers were asked the academic competence of each pupil, i.e. the evaluation of his/her educational achievement. The question was "Is the child a "very good pupil/ good pupil /average pupil / pupil facing difficulties / pupil facing great difficulties?" (translation) 2.38 (1.23)

Social background [scale]

The social background variable is an index indicating the social characteristics of the school. This index is based on questions about the parents' occupations. Schools in which most parents have upper-class occupations score higher on the scale that schools in which most parents have working class occupations. Parents' occupations were not taken into account on an individual level because many children did not answer these questions precisely enough. Yet at a collective level this variable indicates quite accurately to which extent the schools are favored or disadvantaged.

3,97

(1,13) Family politicization [scale] Family politicization is an index built on several questions of the questionnaire : -"Do your parents read a newspaper? □ yes □ no □ I don't know. If they do, which one do they read?" -"At home, do you hear discussions about political figures (François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy...)? □ yes, often □ yes, sometimes □ not so much □ I don't know" -"At home, do your parents listen to the news on the radio? □ yes □ no □ I don't know" (translation) 1,22 (1,04)

  The main explanatory factor for political knowledge is the class the children are enrolled in

	Note. N=358; *=p<.05 **=p<.01 ***=p<.001; F = 36.249 (sig =.000); adjusted R2 =
	.345. See a detailed description of the variables in Appendix 2
		Beta coefficients
	Reference category	(standard errors)
	(Constant)	5.904***
		(.813)
	Age	.391***
	oldest children	(.160)
	Gender	.095*

(.391***), with each class corresponding to an age group based on birth year. The age variable could be affecting the results for several reasons. First, because the acquisition of knowledge is a process of progressive accumulation, even though it may be uneven.

Table 2 .

 2 Mean Scores of Girls and Boys on the Knowledge Test (out of 15)Table2indicates that as children grow older the gender gap widens 4 . At 8-9 years old, children are generally not very knowledgeable about politics, but girls and boys are at approximately the same level. Most only know basic information about their country's government. Girls even have a slight edge (1.257), although the results are not significant. At 9-11 years old, however, children are much more aware of politics, and the gender gap is clearly visible (-2.404**). This means that children begin the political socialization process with an approximately equal level of knowledge, and that the gender gap only appears at a later stage. The results align with those of

		Girls	Boys	t-test (girls)
	8-9 years old	6.199 (N=64)	5.545 (N= 61)	1.257
	9-11 years old	8.252 (N=107)	9.312 (N=126)	-2.404**
	Note. *=p< .05 **=p<.01 ***=p<.001

Table 3 .

 3 General Mean and Gender Difference on Distinct Knowledge Items

	Questions

Note. N=358; *=p< .05 **=p<.01 ***=p<.001; reference category: boys.

Table 4 .

 4 Answers to the Multiple-Choice Questions Depending on the Type of Test (t-

	tests)
		No DK option	DK option provided	Together
		provided	(N=180)	(N= 358)
		(N=178)
	Omission	2.161*	.351	2.155*
	Don't know	-	2.150*	2.150*
	Wrong answer	-.422	-1.855*	-1.136
	Correct answer	-1.628	-1.406	-1.927*
	Note. : *=p< .05 **=p<.01 ***=p<.001; reference category: boys.

Table 5 .

 5 Answers when no DK option is provided with Systematic Assignment of Omissions According to the Expected Score for Guessing(t-test, girls)

	(N=178)

Table 6 .

 6 Probability of Finding the Test Quite/Very Easy (Binary logistic regression)

	Variables	Coefficients	Exp(B)
	Reference category	(standard errors)
	Constant	-1.840***	.159
		(,545)
	Gender	.570*	1.768
	boys	(,270)
	Knowledge level	.194***	1.213
	Higher level	(.046)
	Note. N=275; *=p<.05 **=p<.01 ***=p<.001; R2 Nagelkerke: .128; Khi 2: 25.698

The town (300,000 residents, suburbs included) is socially heterogeneous: some areas have high rates of unemployment and immigration while others are home to very educated and often rich families.

In Table2, children were divided into two age groups: the youngest pupils (CE2 pupils who are aged 8 to 9 years old) and the older pupils (CM1 and CM2 pupils who are aged respectively 9 to 10 years old and 10 to 11 years old). CM1 and CM2 pupils were merged in a single group because CM1 numbers are too small (N=68) to make this age group a single category, and because in the French school system CM1 and CM2 are part of the same broad curriculum.

Moreover, guessing is not always completely random. For example, the respondents might be able to eliminate one of the three answers to some of the questions, and would therefore only be guessing between two possibilities (the expected score then rises to 0.5 points).

This produced internal variation in the results, because all children did not take exactly the same test. However, the different versions of the questionnaire (including DK or not) were randomly distributed to the children in each class. As a consequence, this design had no impact on the overall determinants of political knowledge.

Only half of the test was made of multiple-choice questions.

Since the questions include three answer choices, respondents have a one-in-three chance of selecting the correct answer randomly, and two-in-three chance of selecting an incorrect answer.

This item aimed to verify that the children had taken the test seriously and had sufficient reading and cognitive skills to understand it. The few children who failed this question were not taken into account in the analysis. The item is therefore not included in the knowledge scale.

The results show that the gender gap varies depending on the issue. The question on which girls lag most consists of recognizing Barack Obama in a picture (-3.720***), almost immediately followed by the question on identifying Vladimir Putin as the President of Russia (-2.264*). These results indicate that boys score higher on international knowledge, which is consistent with the findings of other scholars about adults [START_REF] Applebee | Literature & U.S. History: The instructional experience and factual knowledge of high school juniors[END_REF][START_REF] Kneedler | Differences between boys and girls on California's new statewide assessments in history/ social science[END_REF]. Technical questions about French politicians (Jacques Chirac and Manuel Valls) also recorded higher scores for boys (respectively -2.586** and -1.949*). Meanwhile, girls scored as well as boys or even slightly better when asked to name the city mayor (-.247), to determine whether France is led by a right-or left-wing president (.084) and to state François Hollande's function (President,.632). This means that girls are equally well informed about local affairs, as is the case for adults [START_REF] Shaker | Local Political Knowledge and Assessment of Citizen Competence[END_REF], and about general facts on French politics, although they score lower on items involving particular politicians.

Interestingly though, they do not score lower than boys when asked to recognize Marine le Pen (.487). The reason might be that girls tend to more easily recall information about women [START_REF] Dolan | Do Women and Men Know Different Things? Measuring Gender Differences in Political Knowledge[END_REF]. Whatever the exact explanation of these results, they indicate that the gap varies according to the sub-areas of knowledge. This could be considered a result of gender socialization, be it parents educating girls and boys differently about politics or the children themselves developing different areas of interest. Thus far, the results show that the gender gap in children's political knowledge can be explained by gender socialization. But another explanation could challenge these findings: indeed the gender gap might also partly result from methodological biases.

Could the Gender Gap be a Consequence of Methodological Biases?

The methodological explanation of the gender gap assumes that men and women use different knowledge test-taking strategies, which artificially inflate the scores of men [START_REF] Luskin | Re(:)Measuring Political Sophistication[END_REF]. This is because multiple-choice questions give respondents a chance to guess, and men take the chance more often than women (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1993).

When standard grading is used ("don't know" and wrong answers graded 0, correct answers graded 1), the expected score for guessing is 0.33 points per question when the items have three possible answers 5 . Consequently, multiple-choice questions always overestimate knowledge levels depending on how often respondents try to guess. Research by [START_REF] Chiche | Les connaissances politiques[END_REF], [START_REF] Mondak | The knowledge gap: A reexamination of gender-based differences in political knowledge[END_REF] and [START_REF] Fraile | Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge in Europe[END_REF] suggests that when the respondents are unsure, all things being equal, men tend to guess while women tend to choose the don't know