There’s a new paper by Amanda Clayton and Pär Zetterberg on the political effects of gender quotas. The paper looks at government spending expenditures between 1995 and 2012, a period when many countries adopted quotas for women. Taking an effects-of-causes approach, the paper takes the implementation of these quotas as an external shock. I really like how they differentiate between quota adaption and quota implementation!
The introduction of quotas is indeed associated with substantial increases in government spending on public health, and (relative) reductions in military spending. The paper comes with extensive robustness checks (e.g. it’s not just about the connection between post-conflict societies and quota adoption), but the sceptic in me cannot let go of the nagging feeling that we don’t know enough about when quotas are implemented… but definitely a paper you should read!
Clayton, Amanda, and Pär Zetterberg. 2018. ‘Quota Shocks: Electoral Gender Quotas and Government Spending Priorities Worldwide’. The Journal of Politics, May, 000–000. https://doi.org/10.1086/697251.
Didier Ruedin 