Gender biases: evidence from a natural experiment in French local elections

Women are underrepresented in politics. In this paper, we test one of the potential explanations for this situation: gender biases from voters. We use a natural experiment during French local elections in 2015: for the first time in this country, candidates had to run in pairs, which had to be gender-balanced. We argue that this reform confused some voters, who might have assumed that the first name on the ballot represented the ‘main’ candidate. Since the order of the candidates on the ballot was determined by their alphabetical order, the order of appearance of male and female candidates was as-good-as-random and this setting allows us to isolate gender biases from selection effects. Our main result is that there exists a negative gender bias affecting right-wing candidates, whose vote shares were lower by 1.5 percentage points when the female candidate appeared first on the ballot. The missing votes prevented some pairs of candidates from proceeding to the second round of voting. Using data on newspaper circulation and additional institutional features of the election—namely the fact that candidates can (but do not have to) report additional information about themselves on the ballot—we show that higher levels of information decrease discrimination. We argue that the discrimination we identify is, therefore, likely to be statistical.