IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_11851.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Female Leaders and the Representation of Women in Government

Author

Listed:
  • Niklas Potrafke
  • Luisa Dörr
  • Klaus Gründler
  • Tuuli Tähtinen
  • Luisa Dörr

Abstract

Does electing female politicians increase women’s political representation? Using a difference-in-differences design on a comprehensive cross-national dataset, we find that the first election of a female incumbent systematically increases the share of women in government. To address selection concerns, we apply the synthetic control method to a unique case of exogenous government change: the appointment of Germany’s first female state prime minister in 1993 — without a state election. Our findings provide causal evidence that her entry led to a lasting rise in women’s political representation, highlighting how even one influential woman can help others ascend to high political office.

Suggested Citation

  • Niklas Potrafke & Luisa Dörr & Klaus Gründler & Tuuli Tähtinen & Luisa Dörr, 2025. "Female Leaders and the Representation of Women in Government," CESifo Working Paper Series 11851, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11851
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11851.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    political leaders; gender gap in politics; political participation; political representation; gender composition.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

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

    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:ces:ceswps:_11851. 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: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.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.