Missing Men and Women´s Demand for Political Representation?

Barbara Boelmann () and Carola Stapper

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: Over the past century, women have gained formal political rights, yet remain underrepresented in leadership—partly due to lower demand for representation among women themselves. In this paper, we shift the perspective from why men extended political rights to women toward what shaped women’s own demand for representation. Specifically, we study how male absence during World War I affected German women’s demand for the franchise, exploiting exogenous variation in drafting intensity across regions for identification. To make demand for political representation directly measurable, we construct a newly digitised panel dataset of the universe of German suffragette clubs—a revealed-preference measure of demand, given the considerable costs of maintaining a club, especially under wartime restrictions on political activism. Our results show that women were more likely to keep suffragette clubs open in counties with greater male absence. This effect is driven by regions where women publicly led war relief efforts, pointing to agency and specifically women’s experience in visible leadership roles as the central mechanism. We further show that this demand for representation persisted after the franchise was extended, with women more likely to run for parliament and to vote in counties with greater wartime male absence and a suffragette club.

Keywords: women's political representation; suffrage movement; agency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J16 N44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
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Related works:
Working Paper: Missing Men and Women’s Demand for Political Representation (2026)
Working Paper: Missing Men and Women's Demand for Political Representation (2026)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2025_740

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