Thursday, July 9, 2015
H402 (28 rue des Saints-Pères)
Throughout the twentieth century women gained voting rights in the majority of the world’s democracies. In many countries, extending the franchise meant doubling the electorate in one fell swoop. While a vast literature examines why women were given the right to vote, much less is known about how the introduction of female voters changed the constellations of political power and partisanship around the world. In this paper we formulate three theses that link female political preferences to electoral outcomes: first is the ‘conventional-wisdom’ that women were more religious than men and would therefore support conservative parties; second, that because women are poorer than men even within classes, they will prefer to vote for parties with redistributive programmes; or third, that female voters will be loyal to the party that secured their emancipation. We adjudicate between these theses by estimating the effect of women’s enfranchisement on electoral outcomes using time-series cross-sectional data from 1890 to 1990. The data include all countries that enfranchised women separately from men in Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, and Asia. We find that parties that extended voting rights to women without complementary programmatic policies were not rewarded with loyalty. Instead, women’s conservativism emerges in countries with high religiosity, especially Catholicism; but these effects are mitigated by industrialism, and in particular the growth of women in manufacturing and industry. This research suggests that in order to account for the influence of women on politics, redistributive voting models have to be augmented to deal with normative priorities.
