Gender and Political Representation

In my dissertation, I present three papers that evaluate the causes of women’s political under-representation through a supply, demand, and institutions framework. First, I focus on elite demand. Drawing on theories of gender bias, group attachment, and partisan identity, I conduct a field experiment in Canada to examine whether political elites exhibit gender discrimination when responding to political aspirants. The results indicate that legislators are more responsive to female aspirants and more likely to provide them with helpful advice when they ask about how to get involved in politics. This pro-women bias, which exists at all levels of government, is stronger among female legislators and those associated with left-leaning parties. Next, I focus on mass demand. Drawing on theories of gender bias, gender stereotypes, and role congruity, I conduct a choice experiment in South Korea to examine how candidate sex and gender expression shape voter preferences. I find that voters, on average, prefer female candidates. Despite this pro-woman bias, however, voters don’t think that women will win the election. These results suggest that we shouldn’t necessarily infer voter behavior simply from voter preferences. When it comes to how voters evaluate candidates who deviate from gender norms, I find that voters tend to prefer candidates who run counter to gender stereotypes: they prefer women candidates who present a “tough” approach to politics and men candidates who present a “compassionate” approach. The third paper takes a more aggregate-level approach and looks at how supply-side and demand-side factors interact to affect women’s representation while controlling for institutional context. Existing empirical studies treat supply-side and demand-side factors separately and ignore the inherent interaction at the theoretical core of the supply and demand framework. However, women’s descriptive representation should only be high when supply and demand are both sufficiently high. I test the implications of my theory using a new global dataset on women’s representation from 1990 to 2018. The results are consistent with my theory and are substantively important because they indicate the conditions under which we can expect supply-side and demand-side factors to actually translate into greater female political representation.

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