The share of women in political offices has increased considerably over the past few decades in almost every country in the world. Does this matter for policy outcomes? This is the first paper to provide a literature review on the substantive effects of female representation on policies. In developing countries, the increase in female political representation has caused a better provision of public goods, especially with regard to education and health. In developed countries, higher female representation has not affected public policies as measured by spending patterns. However, more recent evidence shows that female representation has induced changes in parliamentary deliberations and specific policy choices (e.g. more public child care) that may not be reflected in the observable composition of public spending. Finally, higher female representation has improved institutional quality by reducing corruption and rent-extraction by those in power.
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Women remain underrepresented in politics and it remains unclear how this might change. In this paper, we investigate whether female council candidates receive more preferential votes when a female mayor has been recently elected into office. We hand collect data for 109,017 candidates in four open-list local council elections (2001–2016) in all 426 municipalities of a German state. Based on RDD estimations for close mixed-gender races, we show that female council candidates advance more from their initial list rank when the mayor is female. This effect spreads to neighboring municipalities and leads to a rising share of female council members. (JEL D72, J16, J71)
SUMMARY
This paper empirically analyzes whether large governments in Europe reflect efficient responses to a changing social and economic environment (‘welfare economic view’) as opposed to wasteful spending (‘public choice view’). To this end, the effect of government size on subjective well‐being is estimated in a combined survey and country‐level dataset covering 153,268 respondents from twelve EU countries over the 1990–2000 period. The first finding is an inversely U‐shaped relationship between government size and well‐being. In addition, the analysis suggests that given the high institutional quality as compared to other parts of the world there might be scope for a further enlargement of governments in the EU from a well‐being perspective. However, one must acknowledge that the effect on well‐being may be quite small and that democratic societies in Europe have no experience with even larger governments. The investigation also reveals that the impact of government size on well‐being depends negatively on levels of corruption and positively on the extent of decentralization. Moreover, left‐wing voters and low‐income earners are the main beneficiaries of a large public sector. Finally, in all twelve EU countries included in the sample higher levels of well‐being could have been achieved by allocating a higher share of public resources to education, while Finland and Germany could have given an additional boost to well‐being by cutting expenditures on social protection.
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