“Votes for Women” on the edge of urbanization

The electoral law of May 28, 1952, extended voting rights to all adult women in Greece. This paper examines the impact of women’s enfranchisement on party vote shares using a unique, hand-collected community-level dataset for seven electoral constituencies where by-elections were held in 1953 and 1954 for strictly exogenous reasons. Our empirical approach exploits variation in the proportion of women in the electorate across communities, using a difference-in-differences design that controls for unobserved fixed community characteristics. Our results support the traditional gender voting gap hypothesis (women voting more conservatively than men) in the urban constituency of Thessaloniki, while showing no gender voting gap in the six predominantly rural constituencies in our sample. We show that the gender voting gap is highly conditional on the proportion of women in the labour force; women tend to vote more conservatively in communities with low women’s labour force participation. Once this conditionality is considered, a pro-right shift in voting is also observed in communities outside Thessaloniki. As Greece is on the edge of urbanization, local economic development and women’s labour force participation are negatively correlated. In more urbanized areas like Thessaloniki, men work outside the family farm for higher wages, while women stay at home and invest in household-specific skills that have no value outside the family. This loss of economic independence limits women’s “exit” options and creates social norms that prioritize marriage as the ultimate goal, leading them to vote more conservatively than men.