The youth gender gap in left-right ideology has grown in recent years – it is greater among young men and women today than in earlier years going back to 2002. In 2024, in Europe as a whole, the gender gap in left-right ideology is greatest among the young(aged 15-29), compared with older age groups. In four of the five countries studied, the youth gender gap in left-right ideology is significant and most pronounced in Sweden, Spain and Poland. Only in Germany do we not find a youth gender gap in left-right ideology. Across all European countries, the youth gender gap in left-right ideology is explained by young women identifying as more left wing than older women, while young and older men identify as similarly left or right wing. In Spain and Sweden, however, we see that young men identify as particularly right wing compared to older men. 2.2.2 Voting patterns We now move to an analysis of gender and age gaps in voting for certain party families. In this case, we highlight only the five countries selected and take each case individually. In the ESS survey, respondents are asked which party they voted for in the latest national parliamentary election and are given a set list of existing political parties from which to choose. Our analysis separately considers each party family of interest. We created a binary variable, which equalled“1” if the respondent voted for social democrats and“0” if the respondent supported any other party. We did likewise for centre-right, left/green and far-right parties. Non-voters and respondents under the age of 18 are not included in the analyses, as we are most interested in gender/ age partisan divides that most closely reflect the actual election outcomes. It is noteworthy that the analyses of voting patterns using survey data comes with some limitations. Firstly, people may either not accurately recall which party they voted for in the last election, or they may indicate a different party for social desirability reasons. Because voting for far-right parties is still often stigmatised in many European countries, social desirability bias may particularly lead to far­right voters indicating that they voted for a different party than they actually did. Secondly, some population groups tend to be underrepresented in survey data because some population groups are less likely to respond to surveys than others, and these disproportionately include far-right voters. Therefore, the survey data analysed may partly be biased. In fact, due to these limitations, there are fewer far-right voters in our sample than we would expect by their vote shares in recent national elections. For example, Germans are twice as likely to vote for the AfD in reality than they reported in the ESS survey(i.e., 5.4% in the 2023 ESS sample compared with 10.4% in the 2021 election). Similarly, Swedes are three times more likely to vote for the Sweden Democrats than they report in the ESS survey(7.9% in the sample compared with nearly 21% in the latest election), and the Spanish are twice as likely to vote for Vox in reality than as reported in the survey. Our analysis of voting patterns therefore comes with more uncertainty than the analyses of other variables. 36 EqualiZe