How Do Political Parties Respond to Gender Quotas? Evidence from South Korea
Welcome to Higher Seminar in Economics organised by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Jay Lee, CREST and Stockholm University.
Jay Lee, CREST and SU
How Do Political Parties Respond to Gender Quotas? Evidence from South Korea (with Martina Zanella)
Jay Lee is currently a post-doc at CREST, and will join the Department of Economics at Stockholm University as Assistant Professor in September 2021.
Jay Lee's research interests include Development Economics, Family Economics, Economics of Gender.
ABSTRACT: Although gender quotas in politics are one of the most popular affirmative action policies worldwide, they might prove ineffective if they suffer from active resistance by incumbent males. South Korean municipal council elections provide us with a rare opportunity to observe how highly male-dominated political parties react to gender quotas. Gender quotas were implemented in only one out of two independent election arms, allowing us to observe what happened in the arm unconstrained by quota. We analyze the effect of the quota on parties' selection of candidates, by exploiting the discontinuity in the intensity of the quota at given cut-offs of council size. We find that stricter gender quotas in the constrained arm induce parties to put forth fewer women the unconstrained arm. Interestingly, however, this pattern gradually reverses over time. The reversal is driven by parties learning about the competency of females after having experienced a female councilor. This paper warns against the risk of gender quotas being not effective, or even counterproductive, if they are introduced before attitudes have changed sufficiently enough to accommodate them. Nonetheless, it also provides evidence that they can still grow to become effective with time in settings where learning is particularly strong – as in South Korean municipal councils, where women were nearly completely absent before the introduction of the quotas.
This is an online seminar which will take place via Zoom. The link to the seminar will be distrubted by invitation only. Please contact lyudmila.vafaeva@hhs.se if you would like to attend the seminar.