Gender Gaps in Policy Making: Evidence from Direct Democracy in Switzerland

By Patricia Funk, Christina Gathmann. 2008

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper uses a unique data set on individual voting decisions to shed new light on gender gaps in policy making. Our analysis focuses on Switzerland, the world leader in direct democracy, where all citizens directly decide on a broad range of policies at the ballot box. Analysing all federal votes held between 1981 and 2003, we show that there are large gender gaps in the areas of health, environmental protection, defence spending and welfare policy. The gender gaps 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.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fecb6b420c24c12eb312d9ea8f4b3362511a83ea

Citations in the corpus

• Gender Quotas and the Quality of Politicians (2014, unknown): “Second, as women's needs may be different from men's ones, a larger female presence may be justified as a way to redirect policy implementation and public spending towards specific areas (Funk and Gathmann, 2010; Rehavi, 2007).”
• Decentralization and Local Governments' Performance: How Does Fiscal Autonomy Affect Spending Efficiency? (2012, unknown): “…of the mayor, looking at recent political economy literature that stresses the role of more experienced and female representatives in determining policy preferences and spending outcomes (e.g., Edlund and Pande, 2002; Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004; Dal Bó and Rossi, 2008; Funk and Gathmann, 2008).”