IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp18587.html

Missing Men and Women’s Demand for Political Representation

Author

Listed:
  • Boelmann, Barbara

    (University of Cologne)

  • Stapper, Carola

    (Johannes Kepler University Linz)

Abstract

We shift the perspective from why men extended political rights to women toward what shaped women’s own demand. Exploiting World War I drafting variation, we study how male absence affected German women’s demand for the franchise. We construct a new panel of all suffragette clubs - a revealed-preference measure given high wartime costs. Women were more likely to keep clubs open where more men were absent, especially where women led war relief efforts, highlighting agency and leadership experience as the central mechanism. Demand persisted after enfranchisement, with more female candidates and higher female turnout in high-absence counties with a wartime club.

Suggested Citation

  • Boelmann, Barbara & Stapper, Carola, 2026. "Missing Men and Women’s Demand for Political Representation," IZA Discussion Papers 18587, IZA Network @ LISER.
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18587
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp18587.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • N44 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - Europe: 1913-
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

    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:iza:izadps:dp18587. 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: Mark Fallak (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaalu.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.