After the Vote: Programmatic Preferences and Women's Loyalty

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 hypotheses that link female political preferences to electoral outcomes: first is the ‘conventional-wisdom’ that conditional on cultural norms and economic development, women historically supported conservative parties; second, that because women preferred welfare policies, they voted for parties with redistributive agendas; or third, that female voters were loyal to the party that secured their political emancipation.  Analysing a sample of 15 countries, we adjudicate between these hypotheses by exploiting the variation in the change of the size of the electorate after enfranchisement and apply a difference in difference approach. We find that parties that extended voting rights to women without complementary programmatic policies were not rewarded with loyalty. Neither did women historically vote for conservative parties. Instead, women’s distinct set of largely pro-welfare preferences consistently determined their voting preferences for parties with redistributive agendas.