Closing the Campaign Finance Gender Gap: Women, Quotas, and Money in Chile

• In Event: Please Send Money: The Gender Gap in Campaign Finance

Abstract

Women face significant barriers to accessing campaign finance. Documenting patterns in the Global South is difficult, however: reliable, systematic data is rare, though women report receiving fewer party funds and being unable to use family funds for campaigns. We validate these gender gaps in campaign finance via a unique dataset from Chile’s 2017 elections, the first of its kind from Latin America. We examine differences between women’s and men’s access to four forms of campaign finance: their own resources, political party transfers, bank loans, and individual donations.

Chile offers an important test for gender gaps in campaign finance, given measures designed to equalize access to money and thus raise women’s descriptive representation. The 2017 elections were conducted under a new electoral system, which combined open-list proportional representation with a 40 percent gender quota. The quota law also stipulated that the state would pay parties a bonus for every woman elected, and reimburse women candidates at higher rates than men. Yet preliminary analysis shows that these incentives did not close the gap, partially explaining why women were elected in greater numbers than before, but over fifteen percentage points below the quota threshold.

Using data from 132 Senate candidates and 960 lower house candidates, we find that women placed fewer personal resources in their campaigns and received fewer party transfers. Further, women lower-house candidates received smaller bank loans. These patterns hold irrespective of party ideology, though left parties shortchange women in lower-house races, whereas right parties shortchange women in upper-house races. We also control for candidates’ professional background, political experience, and district competitiveness. Overall, the gender gap in campaign finance persists, despite incentives to help women compete in open-list elections. Qualitative interviews corroborate this finding, as party leaders and candidates report that few actors paid attention to the quota’s financial incentives.

Authors

• Magda Hinojosa, Arizona State University

• Jennifer M. Piscopo, Occidental College

• Gwynn Thomas, SUNY, University at Buffalo

• Peter M. Siavelis, Wake Forest University