Can women's performance in elections determine the engagement of adolescent girls in politics?

Paulo Arvate, Sergio Firpo and Renan Pieri

European Journal of Political Economy, 2021, vol. 70, issue C

Abstract: Women are responsible for important results in the public sector, but their participation as politicians is still small. One possible way of correcting this situation in the future will be to increase the degree to which adolescent girls participate in politics. The literature about women's empowerment has identified that adolescent girls participate more in politics when role model women are elected. Unlike this literature, however, we run a regression discontinuity design and we show that the defeat of a woman also leads to other women being discouraged from participating. Our main idea is that the performance of female politicians has an influence on the engagement in politics of adolescent girls. Our measure of this engagement is not generated by measuring the perception of the aspirations of adolescent girls, but is taken from net registration to vote between Brazilian municipalities with victorious and defeated female leaders (mayors). Two mechanisms are important for explaining our results: the exchange of experiences between adolescent girls of different ages, and informal (through the Internet and public Wi-Fi) and formal (through the municipal anti-discrimination program) information.

Keywords: Role model woman; Empowerment; Electoral performance; Engagement; Exchange of experiences; Information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268021000458
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:poleco:v:70:y:2021:i:c:s0176268021000458

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2021.102045

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().