13:15 - 15:30
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
J. Andrew Harris
Discussant/s:
Ana Weeks, Lukas Haffert
Meeting Room B

Alba Huidobro
Gender and political selection: Experimental evidence about how party leaders appoint their teams

Jan Berz
Female Front-Runner Entry and the Gender Gap in Voter Turnout. Findings from a Differences-in-Differences Design

Javier Martínez-Cantó, Tània Verge
The gender politics of access to party office

J. Andrew Harris, Rabia Malik
A Booth of One’s Own: Pakistani Elections and the Effectiveness of Female-Only Polling Stations
Female Front-Runner Entry and the Gender Gap in Voter Turnout. Findings from a Differences-in-Differences Design
Jan Berz
Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin

Does the gap between women's and men's turnout decrease when female front-runners enter the electoral arena? In past decades the gender gap in voter turnout has decreased in many national elections, but persists in most sub-national elections. I argue that gender differences in turnout reduce once major parties select female politicians to lead their election campaigns, because female voters are more likely to turn out when a highly visible candidate from their respective group leads the election campaign. This paper estimates the causal effect of female front-runner entry on the gender gap in voter turnout with a differences-in-differences approach and administrative election statistics from German state elections between (1960-2018). Observational survey data from German state selections further identify mechanisms unobservable in the aggregate administrative data. The findings provide quasi-experimental evidence that the gender gap in voter turnout decreases after the entry of female front-runners, in particular among young voters, but only provide weak evidence against a true causal effect of very minor magnitude.