【AEW Webinar】Party Nominations and Female Electoral Performance: Evidence from Germany

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• 研討會日期 : 2023-08-17
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor Thomas Fujiwara
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Thomas Fujiwara received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of British Columbia in 2011. He is currently an Associate Professor at Princeton University. His research is centered on political economy, with a particular focus on development and gender in low and middle income countries.
• 演講摘要 : What accounts for differences in electoral success between male and female candidates? Gender differences in election performance of directly elected candidates may be due to voter discrimination, candidate characteristics, or due to differences in party popularity in the constituencies where female candidates run. We exploit features of the German mixed electoral system and a decomposition strategy to differentiate between these three channels. Using a panel of all candidates for the federal parliament in eleven elections (1983-2021), we document that the relative under-performance of female candidates nominated by the two largest parties can be explained by systematic nomination behavior, which adversely affects female candidates. Moreover, parties' nominations strategies explain most of the gender gaps in electoral performance across all parties and election years. Unlike prior work, we do not find evidence that bias among voters systematically contributes to candidate gender differences in vote shares. Our findings thus highlight parties and not voters as the main drivers of female under-representation, and therefore have important implications for strategies aimed at reducing gender-based discrimination.
• Working Paper Title : How does gender quota shape gender attitudes?
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Yu-Hsin Ho is currently an undergraduate student of Economics at National Taiwan University. His research interests are Gender, Labor Economics, and Political Economy.
• Working Paper Abstract : Starting in 2002, each electoral district in Taiwan is required to reserve one seat for women out of every four seats at the local councils, creating a "zigzag" function of female councilors proportion across districts. Using this function, we estimate the effects of exposure to female political leadership on gender attitudes and behaviors. For son preference, we find that the gender quota reduced the propensity for parents with two daughters to give a third-parity birth, whereas there is no such effect on parents with two children of other sex compositions. This finding is confirmed by the evidence of self-reported son preference revealed in survey data. We further find that the gender quota encouraged female high school graduates to attempt college admission and pursue a college major in law or political science, which commonly prepare students to develop a career in politics. The gender quota also empowers married women to play a more active role in multiple household decisions. Our findings support the hypothesis that female political leaders perform as role models who elicit more egalitarian gender attitudes from women.