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Research

Non-Progressive Women’s Vote - The varied political impact of female suffrage Job Market Paper

Abstract: Women's political inclusion is widely associated with progressive policy change. Important causal evidence comes from the local impact female suffrage had during the US Progressive Era, a period in which American politics already followed a liberal trend. I hypothesize that the political impact of largely low-informed new female voters depends on their political context, such as the turnout and vote choice of their male household members. To test this, I exploit quasi-random local franchise extensions to women between 1966-1971 in Switzerland when right-wing parties experienced a momentum. My findings show that in this context, female suffrage moved municipal party vote shares to the right and lowered municipal expenditure. I complement my findings with a 1972 national election survey to provide suggestive evidence that the effects are driven by selection into turnout of women from households with right-voting men. I further exploit the change in municipal Yes-vote shares among male voters for two Swiss national referenda on female suffrage between 1959 and 1971. I show that municipalities, which quasi-randomly introduced local female suffrage in between the two referenda, increased their support much more. This increase is driven by municipalities in which a majority of men was initially opposed to national suffrage. Hence, I find no indication of male backlash against women's vote.

What Drives Support For Enfranchisement? - The Case of Swiss Female Suffrage

Abstract: Democratisation literature mostly focuses on the elite's decision to extend the franchise. But in many cases, current voters have to decide whether to grant the vote to a broader population. Little evidence exists on what factors drive the support among those who are already enfranchised. In this paper, I exploit the change in municipal Yes-vote shares among male voters for two Swiss national referenda on female suffrage between 1959 and 1971. I show that municipalities, which quasi-randomly introduced local female suffrage in between the two referenda, increased their support much more. This increase is driven by municipalities in which a majority of men was initially opposed to national suffrage. Conditioning on similar initial support, I further show that this difference cannot be explained by a "ceiling effect". My findings can also not corroborate that the rise in support is driven by post-suffrage change in municipal party vote shares, expenditure, or cultural proxies, such as female labour market participation.

Partisan Incumbency Disadvantage - A Revised Empirical Strategy To Identify It with Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen (under Review)

Abstract: Partisan incumbency disadvantage is the extent to which a candidate is im- peded by her party’s incumbency status in an open-seat race. The current lit- erature suggests its prevalence in young democracies and explains it through weak parties or corruption. However, we show that canonical regression dis- continuity designs (RD) to estimate this quantity can contain a negative bias. Cause is an imbalance in voters’ uncertainty about the candidate’s quality at the RD cut-off. We propose a revised empirical strategy to circumvent bias. Replicating a study by Klasnja & Titiunik (2017) using Brazilian mayoral election data from 1996-2012, we apply both the canonical and the revised strategy to identify the electoral disadvantage incumbent parties face. We find that using the new approach cuts the replicated effect by three quarters (from -13.2% to -3.1%).

Work in Progress:

Measuring Gender Bias Against Political Leaders with Salomo Hirvonen (working with cross-national party leadership and polling data)

Ranked Choice Voting & Minority Candidates’ Electoral Chances with Karen Nershi

How Does the Death of Family Members Affect (Female) Migrants’ Lives? with Elena Pupaza and Ben Wilson (working with Swedish register data)