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Spill-over Effects of Affirmative Action: Political Representation and the Power of the Elderly

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  • Audinga Baltrunaite
  • Alessandra Casarico
  • Paola Profeta

Abstract

There is evidence that age matters in politics. In this paper we study whether implementation of affirmative action policies on gender can generate additional effects on an alternative dimension of representation, namely, the age of politicians. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in candidate lists for local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all municipalities went through elections during this period, we can identify two groups of municipalities and use a Difference in differences estimation to analyze the effect of gender quotas on the age of elected politicians. We find that gender quotas are associated with election of politicians that are younger by more than one year. The effect occurs mainly due to the reduction in age of elected male politicians and is consistent with the optimizing behavior of parties or of voters.

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  • Audinga Baltrunaite & Alessandra Casarico & Paola Profeta, 2014. "Spill-over Effects of Affirmative Action: Political Representation and the Power of the Elderly," CESifo Working Paper Series 4955, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4955
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Baltrunaite, Audinga & Bello, Piera & Casarico, Alessandra & Profeta, Paola, 2014. "Gender quotas and the quality of politicians," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 62-74.
    2. Lata Gangadharan & Tarun Jain & Pushkar Maitra & Joe Vecci, 2022. "Lab-in-the-field experiments: perspectives from research on gender," The Japanese Economic Review, Springer, vol. 73(1), pages 31-59, January.
    3. Maitra, Pushkar & Rosenblum, Daniel, 2022. "Upstream effects of female political reservations," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    gender quotas; municipal elections; difference in differences; age;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets

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