15:00 - 16:40
P4
Room: South Hall 2B
Panel Session 4
Cyrill Otteni - Female political empowerment and the gender gap in political participation
Martin Haselmayer - Equality Of What? Mapping Changes In The Equality Concepts Of Parties In OCED Countries Since 1970
Andy Harris - A Booth of One's Own: Gender and Turnout in Pakistan
Didac Queralt - Historical origins of gender gaps in political representation: And how cultural entrepreneurs can help close it
Katharina Pfaff - Gender and Political Protest: Understanding Mass Mobilization for Gender Equality
Historical origins of gender gaps in political representation: And how cultural entrepreneurs can help close it
P4-04
Presented by: Didac Queralt
Aina Gallego 1, Didac Queralt 2, Ana Tur-Prats 3
1 Barcelona University
2 Yale
3 University of California at Merced
Do historical experiences explain why women are underrepresented in politics? If so, can historical legacies be remedied within a lifespan? We address both questions by studying the effect of distinct cultural heritages created by two prototypical historical family types--nuclear and stem--on women’s representation in local councils in Spain from 1979 to 2015. Although prototypical family types disappeared in the mid-twentieth century, the political representation of women after democratization was significantly lower in nuclear than in stem family regions, reflecting centuries of socialization in conservative gender norms. Differences in women political representation between regions mostly disappeared after 1990s. We examine three possible explanations: changes in labor market outcomes, changes in societal gender attitudes, and adoption of voluntary gender quotas. Our data are consistent with the latter mechanism: The top-down introduction of voluntary quotas in the late 1980s balanced-off the negative cultural legacy in nuclear region municipalities. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of cultural persistence and speculate about the role of feminist groups as "cultural entrepreneurs" responsible for the rapid diffusion of gender parity norms and institutional change.