The enfranchisment of Wonen and the Welfare State by Graziella Bertocchi Comments by John Hassler IIES, Stockholm University

Theory in very few words Men and women are different in two ways. –Men have are physicallty stronger -> a wage premium that declines as the economy grows. –Women have a stronger taste for welfare state spendings. Larger difference when divorce laws are liveral. The median man decides if to extend voting rights to women. His trade-off involves –a cost of keeping women without voting rights that depends on national culture (religion) –the cost of increased public spendings when women gets to vote. The second cost decreases over the course of development since higher income is associated with less gender inequality in wages and thus in most preferred taxes. Women are granted voting rights earlier; –when costs of keeping them without rights are high (non-catholic countries). –Income is higher (smaller gender gap is smaller). –Divorce laws are strict (smaller gender gap), Increase in size of welfare state is larger when costs are high (non- catholic countries).

Comments Nice and clear paper. Model transparent and makes a lot of sense. Only two questions: 1.Do we know anything more directly about the mechanism? 2.Is the empirical implementation in line with the model?

Are women more leftist? The key mechanism in the paper is women are more pro-welfare state (left) but less so over time as the economy develops (conditional on divorce laws). Is there evidence for this?

A political science view Political scientist seems to agree there is convergence but from the opposite direction. (Inglehart and Pippa IPSR 2000). “The early classics in the 1950s and 1960s established the orthodoxy in political science; gender differences in voting tended to be fairly modest but nevertheless women were found to be more apt than men to support center–right parties in Western Europe and in the United States, a pattern which we can term the traditional gender gap”. “The traditional right-wing gap remains prevalent in developing societies but a pattern of convergence or gender realignment is evident in more developed societies. This lends support to the hypothesis that the shift towards the left among women is strongly influenced by the modernization process.”

European women (used to be) more conservative than men

Some cross-country evidence

Empirical implementation:1 The model is (seemingly) not dynamic. Decision to enfranchise is taken by men only in each period. Then, we can assume conditional independence between observations over time. Then, the implementation seems OK. However, with irreversibility, a hazard model seems better, estimating the probability of entering the state of voting rights for all. But then, observations after enfranchisment contain no information. Perhaps is significance therefore overstated.

Empirical implementation:2 The second proposition is that low costs of keeping women out of voting leads to a small increase in public spending at enfranchisement. This should be tested by looking at the change in public spending at or around enfranchisement. According to the model, conditional on income ( and divorce laws), countries that have extended voting rights to women should have the same public spending regardless of religion. The test finds something else – suggesting that Catholic women are less leftist as suggested in previous work.

Empirical implementation:3 Most contries in the sample extended voting rights just around WW1. A lot of the variation in outcomes comes from the outliers, Switzerland in particular.