Power at Home, Power at the Polls: Gender Turnout Gap in Argentine Presidential Elections

This paper examines whether gender differences in the labor market explain the gender turnout gap in Argentine congressional elections. Using a unique dataset of actual voting records disaggregated by gender, derived from Argentina's historical system of gender-segregated polling stations, in use until 2007, we construct a provincial panel covering 23 districts and eight biennial congressional elections from 1993 to 2007. Unlike the overwhelming majority of studies in this literature, our data come not from surveys but from official electoral records, which avoids the well-known biases associated with self-reported turnout. The key explanatory variable is women's income as a share of total household income, a continuous measure of female economic autonomy at the provincial level. Estimated using two-way fixed effects with province and year effects and clustered standard errors and confirmed by an instrumental variables strategy that addresses endogeneity, we find that a higher female income share is robustly and positively associated with a larger female turnout advantage. The result is consistent with the resource and autonomy model of political participation: economic independence raises women's capacity and motivation to engage electorally.