Gender Quotas and the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge

• In Event: Foreign Policy & Comparative Politics in Advanced Industrial Societies & Ideas, Knowledge and Politics Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Comparative Politics: Advanced Industrial Societies Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Does increasing descriptive representation in parliaments decrease the gender gap in political knowledge? The evidence is mixed. On one side, we have evidence of a ‘role model’ effect, through which with the increase in descriptive representation, women see themselves more represented and have more incentives to get informed. This would increase the knowledge among women and decrease the gender gap. On the other side, more recent studies show that there actually is not a relationship between political knowledge and descriptive representation; I call this the ‘apathy’ effect. Through the ‘apathy’ effect women see the increase in female representatives just because of a policy change and not because of their quality, which lowers the incentives for them to get informed about politics. This leads to a decrease in knowledge for women and increases in the gender gap. But there are inherent endogeneity issues that threaten causal inference when studying the relationship between descriptive representation and the gender gap. I argue that scholars can use gender quotas as an approximation of an exogenous shock to the system that artificially increases female representatives’ numbers. This article investigates the puzzle using time-series cross sectional data for 12 Western European countries, exploiting the fact that six countries have introduced gender quotas during the timeline of the analysis. I use political knowledge data from the Eurobarometer Survey Series, a bi-annual public opinion survey run in all the member states of the European Union. I define political knowledge as the respondent’s knowledge of general political facts (Barabas et al., 2014; Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996), such as which countries are part of the European Union, and who is the President of the European Parliament. The survey questions are all the same for every country, just translated in each country’s language by experts. If the gender gap in political knowledge decreases after the introduction of the quotas, there is evidence supporting the ‘role model’ effect. On the opposite, if there is no effect, then the data supports the ‘apathy effect.’ The results of a hierarchical Bayesian model show that that women have less political knowledge than men, but the presence of a legislative quote slightly reduces this gender gap. While the quota does slightly reduce the gender gap, the effect is not substantively meaningful; the quota reduces the gender gap by only about 10 percentage points. This is a much smaller effect than the one evidenced in current literature. Hence, the data supports the ‘apathy’ effect hypothesis. The results are aligned to recent literature, which finds null effects in similar settings. Taken together, the results suggest that just an increase in descriptive representation is not enough to close the gender gap in political knowledge and we need further analyses to understand the determinants of and to eliminate the gender gap.

Author

• Giulia Venturini, Florida State University