Women in Power: Parliamentary Action, Social Attitudes, and Gender-Based Crime

This paper studies the causal impact of female political representation on legislative behavior, social attitudes, and gender-based crime. Using a regression discontinuity design based on close mixed-gender electoral contests, we compare electorates that narrowly elected female versus male candidates. We link computational text analysis of parliamentary debates, roll-call votes, post-election survey responses, and administrative police records from 2010 to 2022 in Australia. We document three main findings. First, female MPs devote significantly more attention to gender-related issues in parliamentary speech and are more likely to support gender-related legislation, including measures addressing gender-based violence, with no evidence of differential voting absence. Second, exposure to a narrowly elected female MP shifts constituent attitudes toward greater support for women's rights. Third, electorates that narrowly elect a female MP experience a statistically and economically meaningful decline in gendered crime rates during the subsequent term. Together, the results indicate that female representation can shape policy priorities, social attitudes, and downstream gendered outcomes, even within a disciplined party system.