Danish women also don't like nuclear power

Women bad at politics again

Here's a fun analysis I did as a side-project. I have a dataset of ~620 Danes who took a long vocabulary test, as well as answered 30 political questions. One of them was support for nuclear power. The statement was: Denmark should build nuclear power plants (we have 0). Agreement by sex:

The sample is balance by age, so an age control wouldn't do anything. We have 2 other variables that could be tried: vocabulary IQ (101 questions), and political ideology as measuring by the remaining 29 questions. Here's the model results:

The first model is sex alone, model 2 adds age and vocabulary, model 3 adds overall political ideology. Without thinking of covariates, men support nuclear more by 1.18 on the 1-7 scale (Cohen's d = 0.57). Adjusting for age and vocabulary, this becomes 1.26, adjusting for political ideology, it becomes 0.92. These values are not really different beyond chance, so it appears men's preference for nuclear power is at least largely unrelated to overall political ideology between the sexes. Interestingly, we also see that younger people are more in favor, with a beta of -0.32 for age. The effect for political ideology is extremely strong, in that right-wing people are much more in favor, beta = -0.80! This is an insanely high value, but it is supported by a survey of party vote and support for nuclear power:

It's an almost perfect ranking of the Danish parties from communists (Enhedslisten) to centrists, and to libertarians (Liberal Alliance).

So what explains the male preference, or the female one? A study from 1984 found that this relates to the sex difference in concern for safety. This is ironic given that nuclear power is one of the least deadly forms of energy per kilowatt produced.

A study from 2013 found that knowledge of energy issues predicts greater support for nuclear power. This sounds reasonable to me. I don't know anyone who knows a lot about energy issues who is not a fan of nuclear power, and fans are overwhelmingly male, nerdy types.