Does Gender Matter for Political Leadership? The Case of U.S. Mayors

Abstract

What are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes? We answer this question in the context of U.S. cities, where women's participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one-third of the elections in the 2000's. A novel data set of U.S. mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005 was used, and a regression discontinuity design was employed to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics. In contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership, we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government, the composition of municipal spending and employment, or crime rates. These results hold both in the short and the long run. While female mayors do not implement different policies, they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills, as they have at least a 5 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male. But we find no evidence of political spillovers: exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections. ABSTRACTWhat are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes? We answer this question in the context of U.S. cities, where women's participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one-third of the elections in the 2000's. We use a novel data set of U.S. mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005, and apply a regression discontinuity design to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics. In contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership, we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government, the composition of municipal spending and employment, or crime rates. While female mayors do not implement different policies, they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills, as they have a 6-7 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male. But we find no evidence of political spillovers: exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections.

Voters prefer more qualified mayors, but does it matter for public finances? Evidence for Germany

“…Recent studies investigated how female representation affects public finances (Svaleryd, 2009;Ferreira and Gyourko, 2011;Campa, 2011). Initially, our intention was to conduct a similar analyses here.…”

Turnout and Closeness: Evidence from 60 Years of Bavarian Mayoral Elections

“…Females are more likely to run in contested elections, although their overall share of the candidate pool is never larger than 15 percent. The well-known lack of women in politics (Ferreira and Gyourko, 2014;Lawless and Pearson, 2008) is strikingly visible in Bavarian mayoral elections.…”

Gender Differences in Local Executives: Public Policy and Intergovernmental Transfers in a Brazilian state = Diferencias de género en los ejecutivos locales: políticas públicas y transferencias intergubernamentales en un estado brasileño

“…This may point to women having different kinds of political ambition as well as different abilities and strategies in order to fulfil their political goals. Importantly, Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) did not find any gender differences when it came to policies, although they did not test for any possible "women's interests". They do, however, consider the inflexibility of local government as a possibility for the results.…”

“…Moreover, having more women as city councillors is a predictor for having female mayors. Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) found that, once women passed the initial hurdle of the first election, they were more likely to be re-elected than men were. As Murray (2010) has argued, women will enter into politics much later and without the same connections and networks as men, perpetuating their status as "outsiders".…”