Electoral Reforms and the Gender Gap: Evidence from Post-Suffrage Chile

• In Event: Rethinking the Role of Resources in Women’s Political Participation

Abstract

Around the world, women's suffrage often represented the single largest numeric shift in suffrage eligibility. A rapidly evolving literature has shown that women's post-suffrage political participation varied dramatically both within and across countries due to electoral system differences, variation across urban and rural constitutencies, and local level political competition. Most of this knowledge comes from studies of today's richest economies, which had substantial experience with democracy, and many institutional safeguards, already in place in the era of women's suffrage. Shifting focus to the southern cone, this paper asks whether, in places with labor repressive agriculture and clientelist voting practices, women's participation was as responsive to urbanization and competition as elsewhere. Studying Chile, one of Latin America's most democratic countries in the 20th century, we show that communities with higher levels of labor repressive agriculture initially produced higher levels of political participation by women than urban areas, but that two democratizing reforms -- the adoption of the secret ballot and compulsory voting -- propelled urban women's participation to new heights. We suggest that these reforms provided counterveiling incentives to landlords and party operatives, making urban women's participation more valuable and rural women's less valuable after reform.

Authors

• Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University

• Anna Firestone Callis, University of California, Berkeley

• Guadalupe Tuñón, Princeton University