Gender and the Influence of Proportional Representation: A Comment on the Peripheral Voting Thesis

Abstract

The right to vote is a keystone of democracy, but many groups, including those that were long excluded from the ballot, fail to exercise their rights in large numbers. In the United States, cutting edge research has argued that the first women to cast ballots were “peripheral” voters: their decisions to participate were even more sensitive to electoral competition than were men’s, producing larger gender gaps in turnout in less competitive districts. This paper argues that the portability of the peripheral voting thesis depends on the electoral institutions when suffrage was granted. Using the example of Norway, which transitioned from majoritarian rules to proportional representation just a few years after women won the vote, I show that proportional representation, which increases competition on average, produces a dramatic fall in the gender turnout gap, particularly in previously uncompetitive districts. These findings suggest that electoral systems, more than gender, made women peripheral voters

Bringing in the New Votes: Turnout of Women after Enfranchisement

“…Figure 6 is, therefore, the first analysis analogous to Cox, Fiva, and Smith (2016) that regresses gender turnout gap on pre-reform margin. Importantly, Figure 7 uncovers the conditionality of these effects on measures of men’s turnout and, therefore, provides an explanation of why Figure 6 (see also Teele 2022) estimates are relatively modest in size.…”

“…This section provides further support for this argument: while strengthening general incentives from moderate to high narrows the gender turnout gap (as shown in Figure 6, but also see Teele 2022), strengthening such incentives from low to moderate looks to widen the gap (as shown in Figure 7). This suggests that the observed effects of PR reform in Norway on gender turnout gap (Teele 2022, but also see Skorge 2021) may reflect sufficiently high incentives to vote across most localities before the reform rather than, unconditionally, the electoral reform.…”

“…As hypothesized, this demonstrates that the gender gap narrows when incentives strengthen from moderate to high, but widens when such incentives strengthen from low to moderate. Although PR may narrow the gender turnout gap by eliminating the widest gender gaps of the most uncompetitive pre-reform districts (Teele 2022), this is conditional on pre-reform incentives already being sufficiently high-precisely as theorized above.…”

“…In this article, I build on these theoretical insights and extend the focus to both across and within electoral districts in various system. The portability of Corder and Wolbrecht's thesis to PR has been recently questioned by Teele (2022), who hypothesizes that women's peripheral tendencies are a function of electoral systems and, therefore, lessen in PR. In this article, I differentiate between district and within-district levels of analysis and demonstrate that the competition-on-gap effects (i.e., peripheral tendencies) in PR entirely disappear at the district level, but remain meaningful within districts where they have the opposite effect.…”

“… 27 Developed concurrently with this article, Teele (2022) also applies Cox, Fiva, and Smith’s (2016) approach to explaining the gender turnout gap in Norway, but bases main conclusions on descriptive evaluations—by comparing means and by plotting change in competitiveness against gender gap. The latter departs from Cox, Fiva, and Smith’s (2016) approach, who regress turnout on pre-reform competitiveness, while the measure of change in competitiveness suggests a decrease in competitiveness in about half of districts (hence contradicting the conventional wisdom that competitiveness increases under PR; see Cox, Fiva, and Smith 2020).…”