Principal investigator: Viviane Pires Ribeiro
Article title: DOES GENDER MATTER FOR POLITICAL LEADERSHIP? THE CASE OF US MAYORS
Article authors: Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko
Location of the intervention: United States
Sample size: 5.500 elections
Sector: Genre
Type of Intervention: Analysis of impact of female participation in executive power
Primary variable of interest: female participation
in the executive branch
Evaluation method: Discontinuous Regression
Evaluation Context
Although women remain underrepresented in most economic and political positions, in recent decades there has been a significant increase in the number of women assuming leadership roles in the public and private sectors of many countries. This shift has attracted the interest of economists and other social scientists who wish to understand the implications of female leadership (or the lack thereof, as the case may be) for public policy outcomes.
Local governments in the United States (USA) have experienced a significant increase in female participation in politics. Until the 1970s, an insignificant number of women participated in local mayoral elections. However, female participation increased to about one-third in mayoral elections before stabilizing around 1995. The percentage of women who won mayoral elections increased from 2% in 1970 to over 15% in recent years. Female candidates typically had less than a 50% probability of winning from 1965 until the mid-1990s. After that period, that probability aligned closer to the 50% mark.
Intervention Details
Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) investigate the impact of female participation in the executive branch of US cities, using information from over 5.500 elections held in 575 cities between 1950 and 2005. The study differs from existing research because it is the first to focus on women in executive leadership positions in the local public sector, not on legislative participation. The fact that mayors have executive power can facilitate the reallocation of resources in a city to meet the political preferences of a specific individual. Legislators, on the other hand, have to negotiate with other representatives (possibly the executive branch) to pass legislation, so the additional impact of a female legislator may not be as effective or may only be noticeable when large turnout shocks are observed.
The electoral data for mayors used in the study by Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) is an updated version of the sample described in Ferreira and Gyourko (2009). Most of the information is based on responses from a survey sent to all cities and districts in the United States with more than 25.000 inhabitants in the year 2000. The following information was requested: the timing (year and month) of all mayoral elections since 1950; the name of the elected mayor and the runner-up; the total votes and the total votes for each candidate; party affiliation; type of election; and some additional information relating to specific events, such as runoff elections and special elections.
Information on local public finance variables was combined with election data. Public finance data covers fiscal years 1950–2005 and was obtained from two different sources: the Historical Data Base of Individual Government Finances (1970–2005) and the Census Bureau City Finances Series (1950–1969). Local public finance variables include measures of revenue and taxes, expenditures (on current operations and capital goods), employment (full-time and part-time), as well as distributional data relating to spending shares on labor, public safety, and parks and recreation.
Crime rates were combined with election data to estimate the potential gender effect of the mayor on police enforcement efficiency: murder and assault (violent crimes), as well as robbery and theft (property crimes). Crime data is available at the police precinct level in the “Uniform Crime Reporting” reports issued by the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Methodology Details
To investigate the impact of female participation in the executive power of US cities, Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) use a regression discontinuity (RD) design to address the endogeneity of female candidacies to city characteristics. More specifically, the authors compare short- and long-term results in elections where a female candidate almost never wins against a male candidate with those where a female candidate almost never loses to a male candidate.
A two-step procedure was employed to assign gender to mayoral candidates. First, all given names were matched against a Census list of common given names. If the given name was estimated by the Census to be of a specific gender more than 99% of the time, then the name was assigned that gender. For example, Census data shows that over 99% of all those with the name “Robert” were male. Therefore, any candidate whose first name is “Robert” is considered male. Approximately 80% of the candidates had a distinctly masculine or feminine name based on this criterion. For candidates with ambiguous names (e.g., Casey, Pat, Leslie), the authors sought evidence of the candidate's gender. This second step was conducted through internet searches, emails, and phone calls. Internet searches were generally of local government websites and local newspaper archives with articles and photos. Similar searches were conducted in cases where data on first names was lacking.
Results
In contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership, Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) found no gender impact on a variety of local outcomes, such as the composition of municipal spending and municipal employment, the size of municipal government as represented by total spending or employment, or local crime rates. These results hold true in both the short and long term.
The authors also investigate whether the titular effect differs by gender of the mayoral candidate. Even if the city characteristics are quite similar for closed elections, voters may still have pre-determined (i.e., discriminatory) views about women, potentially harming a female candidate's chances of winning the election. In this case, women who take office “randomly” according to the regression discontinuity approach should have greater unobserved skills than the corresponding male candidate. This, in turn, could translate into higher relative probabilities of reelection, since these leaders would have the chance to demonstrate their superior political ability while in office. On the other hand, discrimination can still be powerful while women are in office, harming performance and potentially leading to lower reelection rates. In this sense, the results suggest that female mayors are politically more skilled compared to male mayors. This gender gap in the titular effect is considerable: at least 5 percentage points in an average unconditional probability of female reelection of 56%.
Lessons in Public Policy
According to Ferreira and Gyourko (2014), the election of female leaders can still generate important political repercussions, even in the absence of any impact on policy outcomes. For example, it can increase the chances of success for other women in the future. However, the analysis conducted by the authors concludes that randomly electing a woman as mayor does not produce higher success rates for other women in the short or long term. In the immediate future, the high reelection rates of women in office naturally cancel out the participation of other female candidates. No additional effect is evident one or two decades after the initial election. The authors also tested whether a female mayor affects female success rates in other elections, such as in local electoral districts, but found no evidence of such repercussions.
Although the female mayors did not implement different policies, they appear to have greater, unobserved political skills, as they possess an entitlement effect at least 5 percentage points higher than a male candidate. However, the authors found no evidence of political spillovers: the exogenous election of a female mayor does not change the long-term political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections.
These results suggest that the environments in which women hold political power influence the relevance of gender to policies and political outcomes. For example, it may be more difficult to change policy when women assume leadership positions without the benefit of quotas or political reservations. Furthermore, the nature of the political and economic environment in which cities compete in the United States does not offer much room for redistributive policies, and local politicians may be more sensitive to the preferences of the median voter.
Intense competition among local governments can prevent gender from influencing policy outcomes, as it hinders political parties from implementing divergent policies. Furthermore, the types of policies relevant to local government can also play a significant role in mitigating potential political shifts resulting from the election of a female leader. Economic responsibilities such as local taxation and the provision of basic services fall under the purview of municipal government, while more controversial social issues like abortion and gun control do not.
References
FERREIRA, Fernando; GYOURKO, Joseph. Does gender matter for political leadership? The case of US mayors. Journal of Public Economics, vol. 112, p. 24-39, 2014.
