Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics?

Abstract

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)

The Commensurability Problem: Conceptual Difficulties in Estimating the Effect of Behavior on Behavior

“…Our second application corresponds to empirical studies that focus on the empowering effect of women officeholders by addressing whether one female candidate winning elected office causes other potential female candidates to run for office in subsequent elections (Baskaran and Hessami 2018; Broockman 2014; Ladam, Harden, and Windett 2018).…”

“…Identifying these causal effects is, of course, difficult because of a variety of endogeneity concerns—for instance, perhaps female candidates both win and emerge more often in more liberal districts. To address such concerns, a growing literature uses an election regression discontinuity design (Baskaran and Hessami 2018; Broockman 2014). The idea is to consider districts with male and female candidates running against one another.…”

“…What is the effect of a politician issuing press releases on voter behavior (Grimmer, Messing, and Westwood 2012)? What is the effect of one female candidate running for office on another female candidate’s decision to run for office (Baskaran and Hessami 2018; Broockman 2014; Ladam, Harden, and Windett 2018)? Does indiscriminate violence by a counterinsurgent increase or decrease violence by rebels (Benmelech, Berrebi, and Klor 2014; Condra and Shapiro 2012; Dell and Querubín 2017; Jaeger et al 2012; Lyall 2009)?…”

“…Our second application corresponds to empirical work on the effect of female electoral victory on the empowerment of future female candidates (Baskaran and Hessami 2018; Broockman 2014; Ladam, Harden, and Windett 2018). Here, we show that recent work using the election regression discontinuity design is again not capturing the total effect of female electoral victory from the ideal experiment.…”

A Man's World? The Impact of a Male Dominated Environment on Female Leadership

“…experimental evidence that female leaders receive lower ratings in male-majority groups than in gender balanced groups, and findings by Gagliarducci and Paserman (2012) indicate that female mayors who head an entirely male municipal council are the least likely to survive until the end of their term. Previous studies also find that female superiors benefit women both in the private and the political sector (Kunze and Miller, 2017;Baskaran and Hessami, 2018). 9…”