Bias at the Ballot Box? Testing Whether Candidates' Gender Affects Their Vote

Amy King and Andrew Leigh

No 625, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University

Abstract: Using data from all elections to the Australian House of Representatives between 1903 and 2004, we examine the relationship between candidates’ gender and their share of the vote. We find that the vote share of female candidates is 0.6 percentage points smaller than that of male candidates (for major parties, the gap widens to 1½ percentage points), but find little evidence that the party preselection system is responsible for the voting bias against women. Over time, the gap between male and female candidates has shrunk considerably as a result of changes in social norms (as proxied by the gender pay gap and attitudinal data) and the share of female candidates running nationwide. We find little evidence that party-based affirmative action policies have reduced the gender penalty against female candidates.

Keywords: economics of gender; elections; voting behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP625.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bias at the Ballot Box? Testing Whether Candidates' Gender Affects Their Vote* (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:auu:dpaper:625

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().