The Enfranchisement of Women and the Welfare State

By Graziella Bertocchi. Social Science Research Network, 2007

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico-economic model where men are richer than women, women display a higher preference for public goods, and women's disenfranchisement carries a societal cost. We first derive the tax rate chosen by the male median voter when women are disenfranchised. Next we show that, as industrialization raises the reward to mental labor relative to physical labor, women's relative wage increases. When the cost of disenfranchisement becomes higher than the cost of the higher tax rate which applies under universal enfranchisement, the male median voter is better off extending the franchise to women. A consequent expansion of the size of government is only to be expected in societies with a relatively high cost of disenfranchisement. We empirically test the implications of the model over the 1870-1930 period. We proxy the gender wage gap with the level of per capita income and the cost of disenfranchisement with the presence of Catholicism, which is associated with a more traditional view of women's role and thus a lower cost. The gender gap in the preferences for public goods is proxied by the availability of divorce, which implies marital instability and a more vulnerable economic position for women. Consistently with the model's predictions, women suffrage is affected positively by per capita income and negatively by the presence of Catholicism and the availability of divorce, while women suffrage increases the size of government only in non-Catholic countries.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15e5fc9c004275b682b08ab1a6aff1e4d2694b40

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Citations in the corpus

Gender Gaps in Policy Making: Evidence from Direct Democracy in Switzerland (2008, background): “While for the United States, women's suffrage might have increased state level spending (Lott and Kenny, 1999; Miller, 2008, reports an insignificant estimate), results for Europe are mixed (Aidt, Duta and Loukoianova, 2006; Aidt and Dallal, 2008; Bertocchi, 2011).”
Total work and gender: facts and possible explanations (2012, background): “Bertocchi (2011) constructs a model in which concerns by a changing median voter lead to extensions of rights to women.”
Total Work, Gender and Social Norms (2007, background): “Bertocchi (2007) constructs a model in which concerns by a changing median voter lead to extensions of rights to women.”
Women’s rights and development (2013, unknown): “5 With respect to women’s rights, an interesting paper by Bertocchi (2011) develops the hypothesis that men granted women the vote once industrialization and the ensuing narrower gender wage-gap made male and female preferences over taxation more similar.6 With respect to women’s economic rights, th”
The Economics and Politics of Women's Rights (2012, background): “Bertocchi (2011) examines the reasons for extending voting rights to women.”
Does Gender Inequality Hinder Development and Economic Growth? Evidence and Policy Implications (2013, background): “Bertocchi (2008) argues that development reduces men’s cost to enfranchise women and eventually leads to the same political rights for women and men.”