Gender gaps in policy making: evidence from direct democracy in Switzerland

Patricia Funk · Christina Gathmann

159 citations0/0 files storedEconomic Policy

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Gender Politics and Representation Electoral Systems and Political Participation Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

Abstract

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.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 159 citations exist upstream.

References

2009Gender Differences in Preferences 2009Women in the boardroom and their impact on governance and performance☆1981A Rational Theory of the Size of Government 2007Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?2004Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India 2003Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences 1997An Economic Model of Representative Democracy 2004Rising tide: gender equality and cultural change around the world

Cited by

2011Gender Interactions within Hierarchies: Evidence from the Political Arena 2018Representative Budgeting: Women Mayors and the Composition of Spending in Local Governments 2015Women and Power: Unpopular, Unwilling, or Held Back?2020Can gender quotas in candidate lists empower women? Evidence from a regression discontinuity design 2018Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics?2008

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.