Gender Gaps in Policy Making: Evidence from Direct Democracy in Switzerland
36 Pages Posted: 25 Nov 2008 Last revised: 24 Nov 2010
There are 2 versions of this paper
Gender Gaps in Policy Making: Evidence from Direct Democracy in Switzerland
Gender Gaps in Policy Making: Evidence from Direct Democracy in Switzerland
Date Written: November 10, 2010
Abstract
This paper exploits a natural experiment to investigate the consequences of women making politics at large scale. Our analysis focuses on Switzerland, the world leader in direct democracy, where all citizens can directly decide on a broad range of policies in referendums and initiatives. Exploiting surveys on individual voting behavior for all federal votes held between 1983 and 2003, we show that there are large gender gaps in the areas of health, environmental protection, defense spending and welfare policy which typically persist even conditional on socio-economic characteristics. We also find that female policy makers have a substantial effect on the composition of public spending, but a small effect on the overall size of government.
Keywords: Female Policy Makers, Political Gender Gaps, Switzerland
JEL Classification: H11, H31, H50, D72
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Preferences for Redistribution
By Alberto F. Alesina and Paola Giuliano
-
Preferences for Redistribution
By Alberto F. Alesina and Paola Giuliano
-
Preferences for Redistribution
By Alberto F. Alesina and Paola Giuliano
-
Social Mobility and the Demand for Redistribution: the Poum Hypothesis
By Roland Bénabou and Efe A. Ok
-
Why Doesn't the Us Have a European-Style Welfare State?
By Alberto F. Alesina, Edward L. Glaeser, ...
-
Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics
By Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole