Juggling Gender and Power in China: Female Politicians’ Motivated Risk-Aversion

• In Event: Party Politics and Promotion in China: Privilege, Merit, Loyalty and Gender

Abstract

Existing research on women in politics shows that female politicians behave in distinctive ways from their male counterparts. Most studies, however, are situated in democratic contexts where electoral incentives play an important role in shaping politicians’ behavior. In this paper, I examine female politicians in China, a centralized authoritarian regime where politicians face top-down incentives and accountability. Specifically, I investigate if female politicians differ from male politicians in their risk attitude, and whether the observed difference results from structural factors or psychology. To answer these questions, I first use prefecture-level panel data to compare performance of female and male government leaders during 1998-2012 in terms of both economic development and various aspects of local governance. I find that localities under the leadership of female politicians do not experience significantly different levels of economic growth; however, female politicians are more likely to increase spending on education and poverty elimination, and they are more cautious in government land sales to private firms. It shows that female politicians are more risk-averse when choosing policy priorities. Next, utilizing biographical data on politicians in the same period, I find that while risk-averse policy preference has an overall negative effect on politicians’ promotion chances, its heterogeneous effect on female politicians is positive. Combined, these findings provide evidence that the Chinese regime uses different schemes to evaluate politicians of different genders, and female politicians’ risk-aversion is motivated by career concerns.

Author

• Hanzhang Liu, University of Pennsylvania