IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aejpol/v10y2018i3p95-121.html

Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics?

Author

Listed:
  • Thushyanthan Baskaran
  • Zohal Hessami

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Thushyanthan Baskaran & Zohal Hessami, 2018. "Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics?," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 10(3), pages 95-121, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aejpol:v:10:y:2018:i:3:p:95-121
    Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20170045
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170045
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=2kXprAe88Mwl2N-VSBuWQH91fGrKa4oq
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=mzGTl9Uj4nvsEhr3terAUMEOZHYhByWH
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=4pl6QLi8FJqV5u12vyMdfioCR69u6TG8
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing

    Lists

    This item is featured on the following reading lists, Wikipedia, or ReplicationWiki pages:
    1. Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics? (American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2018) in ReplicationWiki

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:aejpol:v:10:y:2018:i:3:p:95-121. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.