Research

Gender quota laws are designed to enhance equality in representative bodies, yet they are typically adopted by legislatures dominated by men whose careers may be affected. Why do male-dominated chambers adopt quotas?  We build on the literature on internal and external pressures driving quota adoption to offer a complementary explanation centered on legislators' career incentives: in legislatures where careers tend to be short, resistance to quotas is lower because such reforms pose less threat to incumbents' career expectations. We test this argument with original data on all members of seventeen Latin American lower chambers (1989-2022) using Event History Analysis. We find that lower reelection rates lead to earlier quota adoption and that this effect attenuates over time. Chambers with lower reelection rates also move sooner to strengthen quotas. These findings highlight how political careers shape the timing of quotas, and the obstacles men's career expectations can pose to women's representation.

Are young men and women affectively attached to radical right-wing parties? While gender gaps in youth vote choice and ideology are well documented, less is known about their partisan social identities. We investigate this question by focusing on the radical right, a party family often portrayed as having rising appeal among youth, particularly young men. Using original surveys from Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, we leverage a multi-item battery of partisan identity questions and IRT models to construct a measure capturing positive and negative attachments to political parties. Our findings reveal a previously unknown gender gap in identification with the radical right among youth. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, this divide is not driven by young men’s positive identification, but by young women’s negative identification with these parties. This gap is absent among older cohorts, highlighting a generational gender divide with important implications for political representation.

Previous research has shown that expanding the party leadership selectorate to include party members increases the number of candidates and the competitiveness of the leadership elections and, overall, is seen as a legitimate procedure, increasing enthusiasm among voters. However, we do not know how party leadership election details (selectorate type, number of candidates, vote shares of candidates) affect voters' evaluations of a newly selected leader's deservingness, competency, effectiveness, and electoral viability. Using data collected from a conjoint experiment fielded in the UK in 2023 (Study 1) and data on twelve leadership elections across four UK parties between 2014-2022 combined with panel data from the British Election Study (Study 2), we show that membership elections, defeating a high number of candidates, and earning a higher vote share, especially in a crowded election, improve voter evaluations of the new leader along each of these dimensions. Thus, we conclude that newly elected leaders can best claim a mandate for their position if they decisively defeat a larger field of rivals in an inclusive election.

How did women’s access to formal employment affect the gender gap in policy preferences? Studies of the political economy of gender inequality argue that women became more supportive of the welfare state than men as they entered the workforce. However, we still lack causal evidence on the effect of outside-marriage options, such as simply being able to work, on the gender gap in support of welfare. This paper provides that evidence by studying the consequences of the end of the Marriage Bar in 1973, a widespread practice in twentieth-century Ireland requiring women to quit their jobs upon marriage.  A Difference-in-Differences analysis of public opinion data shows that, once the Bar was lifted, married women became less satisfied with their welfare benefits and time budget compared to married men, a signal of a growing divergence between their policy preferences and men's. These results align with explanations of gender gaps in attitudes based on household dynamics and help us better understand the causes of past and present differences between men and women’s policy preferences.