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

• In Event: Gender Quotas, Women’s Political Participation, and Leadership

Abstract

Women’s enfranchisement often occurred in close proximity to other electoral reforms
such as the adoption of proportional representation, compulsory voting, or ballot
secrecy, yet because polling was uncommon in the early twentieth century, the impact of
these reforms on gendered patterns of political behavior is difficult to ascertain. Leveraging
a rare feature of Chile’s electoral system—where men and women cast ballots
in separate urns—we study the impact of the adoption of the secret ballot, and the
subsequent promulgation of compulsory voting, on the gender gap in participation and
preferences in the mid-twentieth century. We find that men voted in greater proportions
for the Left after the secret ballot, but that the large advantage among women
enjoyed by the Christian Democrats emerged only after women cast nearly half of the
ballots under compulsory voting.

Authors

• Anna Firestone Callis, University of California, Berkeley

• Guadalupe Tuñón, Princeton University

• Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University