Gender quotas and strategic voters: Experimental evidence from Chile’s constitutional convention (Job Market Paper)

Link to Paper 

Media coverage: VoxDev 

Citizens' perceptions of certain groups influence voting behavior and policy choices worldwide, frequently reducing the representation of historically disadvantaged people. Can laws limiting the group identity of elected officials undo these effects? And if so, how does this impact legislator competence and how legislatures represent policy preferences of different groups? I examine these issues in the context of Chile's constitutional conventional election, which was the first election to mandate gender parity in both candidate lists and elected officials without limiting voter choice. I induce experimental variation in voter awareness of these mandates by randomizing an electoral booth-level voter information campaign. In treated booths, voters were informed that gender parity for elected officials would be enforced. I have three experimental results. First, treatment increased women's average vote share by 1%. Second, voters in treated booths voted more for the gender they believed would be electorally favored by the mandate. This effect varied by electoral coalitions and was concentrated among front-runners. I show that the effects are large enough to influence outcomes in close elections. Third, treatment reduced votes for men with lower test scores, an informative proxy of competence. Finally, data on individual bills indicate that elected female legislators voted more liberally on social issues such as abortion and domestic violence. In contrast, there are no gender-based voting differences for economic and administrative bills. Overall, these findings support the use of electoral mandates as a coordinating device that, when well-designed, can increase the average legislator's competence and the extent to which policy-making processes reflect voter preferences.

Work in Progress

Can dictatorships improve women's representation? Evidence from Chile's democratic transition (joint with Alejandra Benitez)

Transitions from dictatorship to democracy can help us understand how various political contexts can favor marginalized groups in gaining representation. This project investigates the effects of Chile's transition from dictatorship to democracy on gender representation. During Chile's dictatorship (1973 to 1990), dictator Augusto Pinochet suspended the constitution and appointed mayors to each municipality. During the dictatorship's final years, women made up nearly 20% of the designated mayors. When democratic elections were held, the percentage of women fell by about 15 percentage points. This paper studies the long-term impact of women's exclusion following the dictatorship for political representation of women and public policies. Preliminary analysis shows that during the dictatorship, a similar percentage of male and female mayors ran for office, with a higher number of men running for higher positions (congress and senate). Furthermore, for the first three elections after the dictatorship, the number of female candidates in the right-wing party (supporters of the dictatorship) was significantly higher than in the left-wing party.

[Draft available upon request]

Gender Inequality and Political Misperceptions (joint with Ceren Baysan, Carlos Molina, and Gamze Zeki)

[Currently in the field]

Elite Universities and the Formation of Politicians (joint with Andrés Barrios-Fernández, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman)

This paper provides causal evidence that admission to an elite university significantly increases the probability of becoming an influential politician. We combine rich administrative data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design and show that admission to elite colleges increases the probability of becoming a member of Congress or reaching a high position in government. 

Selection into Politics: A gender perspective

In this paper, I explore how gender shapes political selection into politics. Using a comprehensive dataset of the Chilean population, I study how candidates and elected officials are differentially selected and how a gender quota affects the type of candidate and elected politician. I have four findings.   First, candidates and elected officials of both genders are positively selected. Second, before the gender quota was implemented, women were more positively selected than men. The gender gap in candidate selection disappeared after the implementation of the gender quota, but women officials are still more positively selected than men. Third, after the gender quota was implemented, both male and female candidates became more socioeconomically representative of the population. Fourth, parties respond to the gender quota by placing more women candidates in districts where their party performs poorly.

The efficiency and distributional impacts of temporary driving restrictions (joint with Francisco Gallego and Hugo E. Silva)

This paper estimates the effect on car flows of the temporary driving restrictions applied to 20% of the cars in Santiago de Chile on days with bad air conditions. First, using high-frequency CO data in monitoring stations, we find that the hourly concentration of carbon monoxide, which comes mainly from car emissions, decreases significantly by about 17%. Second, using data for different stations in the city, we find that effects depend on the number of cars available per home, as additional cars allow to avoid the circulation ban. Third, consistent with previous results, we find an increase in the use of public transportation. Fourth, we also find a significant increase in the average speed of buses these days, which suggests an additional positive effect on public transportation users and a decrease in congestion. All these results point out the potential beneficial effects of temporary driving restrictions on congestion and pollution, in contrast to the permanent ones, which typically do not affect pollution, given their impacts on the number of cars owned at the household level.