From Women's Enfranchisement to Female's Participation

• In Event: Collective Action, Conflict, and Political Change from a Historical Perspective

Abstract

The idea that women were to vote less than men when they got the right to vote is widely shared. According to most of the available evidence, that was indeed the case albeit in varying proportions. However, often these figures are based on simple comparisons of turnout rates between the pre and post female enfranchisement elections. Much less is known, however, about the root causes of female political participation upon formal electoral enfranchisement. This article analyses the effect of female enfranchisement during the Spanish Second Republic (1931-1939). Specifically, we exploit a unique individual level panel data set of official registers that include individualized information on turnout (from individual voting roll-calls) as well as other personal characteristics, such as age, address, gender, literacy and occupation, for three elections between 1931 and 1936 (from official registers in the electoral census). First, we analyze whether female participation was conditional upon individual female resources – by exploring at a descriptive level the effects of age, literacy and female working status. Second, we explore the effects of women labour market participation, employing micro level data about female labour participation and official registers about textile industry at the municipality level. Third, we also exploit detailed information about labour conflicts at the firm level between 1906 and 1931 to investigate the formation of women ideology and its effects on electoral participation. Finally, we also examine the conventional wisdom that female enfranchisement increased the conservative support, focusing on the role played by the Catholic Church on exacerbating or mitigating the gender gap. Overall, this paper contributes to our understanding of the causes of female political participation upon formal enfranchisement by exploiting rich individual-level data from a unique historical period of democratization and extension of women suffrage.

Author

• Jordi Munoz, University of Barcelona