An Unintended Consequence of Gender Balance Laws: Mafia Fuels Political Violence

In this paper, we hypothesize that increased female representation in Italian municipality councils — driven by Law 215/2012’s gender-based double preference voting— enhances council quality (proxied by education years), thereby raising councilors’ opportunity costs of engaging with the mafia. Consequently, organized crime may respond by escalating violence. Using a difference-in-differences approach on municipalities with 5,000–15,000 inhabitants, we find a 1.45 percentage-point increase (0.55times the mean of 0.026) in the probability of at least one attack and a 0.85% rise (0.3times the mean of 0.03) in total attacks. Consistent with our hypothesis, the reform increases the city council’s education level by 4 months (0.023 times the mean of 14.283years), driven by a 12.5 percentage-point rise in female representation – since women are more educated than men – and a 3.4-month increase in male councilors’ education.