Does the election of a female leader clear the way for more women in politics?

Thushyanthan Baskaran and Zohal Hessami

No 2017-09, Working Paper Series of the Department of Economics, University of Konstanz from Department of Economics, University of Konstanz

Abstract: Women remain underrepresented in politics and it remains unclear how this might change. In this paper, we investigate whether female council candidates receive more preferential votes when a female mayor has been recently elected into office. We hand-collect data for 109,017 candidates in four open-list local council elections (2001-2016) in all 426 municipalities of a German state. Based on RDD estimations for close mixed-gender races, we show that female council candidates advance more from their initial list rank when the mayor is female. This effect spreads to neighboring municipalities and leads to a rising share of female council members.

Keywords: Female leaders; gender; political labor market; discrimination; preferential voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H70 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2017-09-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-pol
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Journal Article: Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics? (2018)
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