TY - JOUR
T1 - Female participation in parliament. Are we ever going to converge to Scandinavia?
AU - Bravo-Ortega, Claudio
AU - Eterovic, Nicolas
AU - Paredes, Valentina
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank seminar participants at Universidad de Chile and SECHI (Sociedad de Economía de Chile) conference participants for their valuable comments and suggestions. Claudio Bravo-Ortega acknowledges public support from the Fondecyt (Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico) grant [ 1130575 ] and from the Universidad Adolfo Ibañez research units from the Academic Vice Chancellor and School of Business . Valentina Paredes acknowledges funding from the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies [ ANID /FONDAP/15130009 ].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2020/6
Y1 - 2020/6
N2 - Despite the fact that female political participation has been steadily growing over time, women's representation in politics is substantially lower than their proportion in society. In this paper, we investigate the determinants of women's representation using a GMM system estimation to address the possible endogeneity. We employ a unique dataset that covers data for 130 countries from 1972 to 2005 in 7 different geographical regions to estimate a dynamic model for women's representation and calculate each region's steady state. In general, we find that the steady state values are above each region's current percentage of women in parliament; however, without changing other variables, no region significantly increases the percentage of women in parliament. Moreover, we find that 66–87% of the gap between each region's steady state with Scandinavia is explained by female secondary education enrollment, labor force participation, and political and economic rights.
AB - Despite the fact that female political participation has been steadily growing over time, women's representation in politics is substantially lower than their proportion in society. In this paper, we investigate the determinants of women's representation using a GMM system estimation to address the possible endogeneity. We employ a unique dataset that covers data for 130 countries from 1972 to 2005 in 7 different geographical regions to estimate a dynamic model for women's representation and calculate each region's steady state. In general, we find that the steady state values are above each region's current percentage of women in parliament; however, without changing other variables, no region significantly increases the percentage of women in parliament. Moreover, we find that 66–87% of the gap between each region's steady state with Scandinavia is explained by female secondary education enrollment, labor force participation, and political and economic rights.
KW - Dynamic model
KW - Parliamentary elections
KW - Women's representation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85083863551&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ecosys.2020.100759
DO - 10.1016/j.ecosys.2020.100759
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85083863551
SN - 0939-3625
VL - 44
JO - Economic Systems
JF - Economic Systems
IS - 2
M1 - 100759
ER -