Research Paper 18: Effects of the electoral system on the political representation of women
In a new study, Monika Köppl-Turyna and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz (Leiden University) look at the effects of the electoral system on the political representation of women. Using a natural experiment, they compare whether women are more likely to be elected to political office in a proportional representation system or a first-past-the-post system.
Women continue to be underrepresented in legislative offices around the world. At the same time, there is growing academic evidence that women in political office advocate for different policy outcomes than their male counterparts. As a result, the literature is increasingly dedicated to figuring out how to design a political system in which policy outcomes are equally influenced by women and men.
Monika Köppl-Turyna and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz therefore use an example from Poland to examine whether a proportional representation system or a majority voting system ensures more female representation. They use data on candidacies and election results at municipal level, with reference to a change in electoral law in Poland, according to which municipalities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants elected their local representatives between 2002 and 2010 according to the majority voting system, while municipalities above this threshold elected according to proportional representation. To this end, they use a regression discontinuity analysis and calculate how the different electoral systems affect the proportion of female councillors.
The existing literature suggests that a proportional representation system is advantageous for the political representation of women. However, this study differs from the majority of the literature in at least three aspects: It examines the municipal level, as opposed to the national level, which is often used in the wider literature; it uses Poland, a comparatively young democracy where the social status of women is comparatively high (which should mitigate the effects of voter bias against women on electoral outcomes); and it uses a country where party structures are less relevant for running for political office.
Contrary to the existing literature, Monika Köppl-Turyna and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz find that at the local level a majority voting system can lead to more female representation in the legislature. The analysis results for the local elections in Poland, during the period in which the distinction between majority and proportional representation applied, show that up to three to six percentage points fewer women were elected to the local council in municipalities where majority voting applied due to the number of inhabitants exceeding 20,000. Furthermore, a smaller proportion of women candidates were elected in municipalities with proportional representation. This proportion was eight percentage points lower than in municipalities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants where proportional representation applied.
The authors identify three possible channels of action discussed in the literature that could make majority voting at municipal level advantageous for the representation of women. Firstly, the costs of running for office are lower in a first-past-the-post system. Secondly, an internal party nomination procedure and the associated competition can be avoided, which could tend to discourage competition-averse women from running for office. Furthermore, the data shows that internal party nomination procedures are more likely to lead to candidacies by men than by women. Thirdly, although there are just as many female candidates on the ballot papers in municipalities with proportional representation as in municipalities with majority voting, they are primarily placed in lower places on the list, where a successful candidacy is less likely.
The findings have implications for the design of electoral systems in which women and men are represented equally, so to speak, and should therefore have the same opportunities to influence policy outcomes. Furthermore, Monika Köppl-Turyna and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz show that the prevailing finding in the literature that proportional representation promotes the legislative representation of women does not apply in every context.
