Incumbents’ interests, voters’ bias and gender quotas

Guillaume Frechette (), Francois Maniquet and Massimo Morelli ()

No 2006083, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: The adoption of gender quotas inpart y lists has beena voluntary decision by many parties in many countries, and is now a subject of discussioninman y others. The Parity Low passed inF rance in 2001 is particularly interesting because for the first time the quota was set at 50 percent, and the deputies passing the reform are elected in single member districts. In this paper we rationalize parity onthe basis of the self interest of male incumbent deputies: The existence of a voters' bias in favor of male candidates is sufficient to convince the incumbents to advocate for equal gender representationinpart y lists, because it raises the incumbents chances of being re-elected. We confirm empirically the existence of male bias in the French electorate and we show that parity law may have Assembly compositioneffects and policy effects that vary with the electoral system.

Date: 2006-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2006.html (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Incumbents’ Interests, Voters’ Bias and Gender Quotas (2006)
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:cor:louvco:2006083

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alain GILLIS ().