Gender and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Crisis Response / Juan Pablo Chauvin, Clemence Tricaud.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chauvin, Juan Pablo.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Tricaud, Clemence.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w32410.

NBER working paper series no. w32410

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2024.

Summary:

This paper provides new evidence on why men and women leaders make different choices. We first use a simple political agency model to illustrate how voters' gender bias can lead reelection-seeking female politicians to undertake different policies. We then test the model's predictions by exploring leaders' responses to COVID-19. Assuming that voters expect policies to be less effective if decided by women, the model predicts that female politicians undertake less containment effort than male politicians when voters perceive the threat as low, while the opposite is true when voters perceive it as serious. Exploiting Brazilian close elections, we find that, early in the pandemic, female mayors were less likely to close non-essential businesses and female-led municipalities experienced more deaths per capita, while the reverse was true later on, once the health consequences materialized. These results are exclusively driven by mayors facing reelection and stronger in municipalities with greater gender discrimination.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2024.