Gender Interactions within Hierarchies: Evidence from the Political Arena

By Stefano Gagliarducci, D. Paserman. Social Science Research Network, 2009

190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of Italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003. A municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy, whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation between and within ranks. We find that in municipalities headed by female mayors, the probability of early termination of the legislature is higher. This result persists and becomes stronger when we control for municipality fixed effects as well as non-random sorting of women into municipalities using regression discontinuity in gender-mixed electoral races decided by a narrow margin. The likelihood that a female mayor survives until the end of her term is lowest when the council is entirely male, and in regions with less favorable attitudes towards working women. The evidence is suggestive that female mayors are less able at fostering cooperation among men, or alternatively, that men are more reluctant to be headed by women. Other interpretations receive less support in the data. Our results may provide an alternative explanation for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ebde8839052feea29da42ce75b24a5baa00553e

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Citations in the corpus

Gender Gaps in Policy Making: Evidence from Direct Democracy in Switzerland (2008, background): “However, in developed economies there is very little evidence of a gender gap in policy making: Ferreira and Gyourko (2011) and Gagliarducci and Paserman (2012) find no effect for American and Italian mayors.”
Gender Quotas and the Quality of Politicians (2014, unknown): “The regression 28Some studies suggest that the time in office could also be a good measure of the quality of politicians (see Gagliarducci and Paserman, 2012).”
Who Becomes a Politician (2017, unknown): “See, for example, Ferraz and Finan (2009) on Brazilian mayors; Merlo et al. (2010), Galasso and Nannicini (2011), and Gagliarducci and Paserman (2012) on Italian legislators; Dal Bó and Rossi (2011) on Argentine legislators; or Dal Bó, Dal Bó, and Snyder (2009) on U.S. legislators. n lo a d e d…”