Female representation but male rule? Party competition and the political glass ceiling

Olle Folke and Johanna Rickne

No 2012:9, Working Paper Series, Center for Labor Studies from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The share of women in legislative assemblies has grown substantially, but there is still under-representation and it is more severe for more influential appointments. This pattern is mirrored in Swedish municipalities, for which we analyze panel data on the career developments of all 35.000 elected politicians over six election cycles to examine why women fail to rise in the political hierarchy. We show that women have a higher turnover rate which keeps them from accumulating the seniority required to (ever) catch up with their male colleagues. In our analysis, we can rule out that less political experience, lower age, or different responses to changes in family structure are the major contributors to women’s disadvantage. Instead, we find that competition between political parties substantially improves women’s relative performance. We interpret this as evidence for a negative bias against women in the recruitment process being a major contributor to women’s high turnover rate.

Keywords: Careers in politics; Political competition; Supply of politicians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2012-04-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ucls.nek.uu.se/digitalAssets/136/136564_20129.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ucls.nek.uu.se/digitalAssets/136/136564_20129.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ucls.nek.uu.se/digitalAssets/136/136564_20129.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.uu.se/institution/nationalekonomiska/forskning/forskningscentrum/uppsala-center-for-labor-studies/digitalAssets/136/136564_20129.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Female Representation but Male Rule? Party Competition and the Political Glass Ceiling (2012)
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:hhs:uulswp:2012_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series, Center for Labor Studies from Uppsala University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katarina Grönvall ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).