Women on the Ballot and Women at the Polls: How Women’s Representation Shapes Voter Turnout in Local Elections

Sarah Yi-Yun Shair-Rosenfield; Emanuel Coman

doi:10.1017/psrm.2025.2

Women on the Ballot and Women at the Polls: How Women’s Representation Shapes Voter Turnout in Local Elections

Sarah Yi-Yun Shair-Rosenfield, Emanuel Coman

Politics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

We argue that more female candidates on the ballot will decrease the gender participation gap at the polls. We test this hypothesis with data from Italian local elections between 2008 and 2020, taking advantage of a 2012 law requiring at least a third of local council candidates to be women in localities with 5000+ inhabitants. Exploiting the exogenous geographic variation and timing in the implementation of the electoral reform, we evaluate the effect of this exogenously driven variation in women's candidacy on the gendered voting gap. We find a significant and substantively strong causal relationship between the share of women on the ballot and the gendered gap, driven by an increase in women's, but not men's, participation at the polls.

Original language	English
Number of pages	17
Journal	Political Science Research and Methods
Early online date	19 Feb 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2025.2
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 19 Feb 2025

Bibliographical note

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10.1017/psrm.2025.2Licence: CC BY

Women on the ballot and women at the polls: how women’s representation shapes voter turnout in local elections
© The Author(s), 2025
Final published version, 416 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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