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According to the ‘law of dispersion’, the level of inequality in political participation is higher when voter turnout is low. We empirically test this hypothesis by evaluating levels of voter turnout in the 2010 Swedish election to the Västra Götaland county council and in the 2011 re‐election for the same county council. The re‐election voter turnout was reduced by almost half, from 80.6 per cent to 44.1 per cent. Our results support the law of dispersion: the level of inequality in participation substantially increased between young and old, rich and poor, low and high educated and politically interested and uninterested.

Concepts such as risk aversion and anxiety have received renewed attention in various strands of gender and politics research. Most contemporary scholars suggest that gender gaps in this area are related to social norms and stem from social learning rather than from inherent gender traits. Very few, however, elaborate on the gender variable to reach a fuller understanding of the dynamics at work. In this study, we examined gender gaps in levels of anxiety, an area closely related to risk aversion, and we applied a combination of categorical measures of gender distinguishing between “woman, “man,” and “other” and scales capturing grades of femininity and masculinity in individuals. We label this approach fuzzy gender, and we suggest that it can be used to advance research in our field. The key finding is an interaction effect between categorical measures of gender and fuzzy gender: The more female characteristics in women, the higher the levels of anxiety. Moreover, there is no difference in levels of anxiety between men and women with few female characteristics. The data used draw from a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens in 2013.

The rationale for this study is that self-categorising rating scales are becoming increasingly popular in large-scale survey research moving beyond binary ways of measuring gender. We are referring here to the use of rating scales that are similar to graded scales capturing left–right or liberal–conservative political ideology, that is, scales that do not include predefinitions of the core concepts (femininity/masculinity, as compared to left/right or liberal/conservative). Yet, previous studies including such non-binary gender measures have paid little attention to potential effects of survey designs. Using an experimental set-up, we are able to show that sequencing of gender measurements influences the answers received. Men were especially affected by our treatments and rated themselves as significantly ‘less masculine’ when prompted to reason about the meaning of gender prior to self-categorisation on scales measuring degrees of femininity and masculinity. Moreover, self-categorising seems to trigger more biological understandings of gender than anticipated in theory.<br /><br />Key messages<ul><li>Sequencing of gender measurements influences answers received in a survey.</li><li>Men rate themselves as ‘less masculine’ when prompted to reason about gender prior to answering gender scales.</li><li>Self-categorising gender scales trigger more biological understandings of gender than anticipated in theory.</li></ul>