Electoral Competition, Voter Bias, and Women in Politics

Thomas Le and Julien Sauvagnat

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2022, vol. 20, issue 1, 352-394

Abstract: We quantify the implications of voter bias and electoral competition for politicians’ gender composition. Unfavorable voters’ attitudes toward women and local gender earnings gap correlate negatively with the share of female candidates in Parliamentary elections. Using within-candidate variation across the different polling stations of an electoral district in a given election year, we find that female candidates obtain fewer votes in municipalities with higher gender earnings gaps. We show theoretically that when voters are biased against women, parties facing gender quotas select male candidates in the most contestable districts. We find empirical support for such a strategic party response to voter gender bias. Simulating our calibrated model confirms that competition significantly hinders the effectiveness of gender quotas.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvab028 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Electoral Competition, Voter Bias, and Women in Politics (2022)
Working Paper: Electoral Competition, Voter Bias, and Women in Politics (2022)
Working Paper: Electoral Competition, Voter Bias and Women in Politics (2018)
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:oup:jeurec:v:20:y:2022:i:1:p:352-394.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Romain Wacziarg

More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from European Economic Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().