Essays on Female Policymakers and Policy Outcomes

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: Female Policymakers and Educational 9

Expenditures: Cross-Country Evidence

Chapter 3: Women in Politics: A New Instrument for Studying 41 the Impact of Education on Growth

Chapter 4: Do Gender Quotas Influence Women's 73

Representation and Policies?

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Introduction

Parliament is the place where a country's policy direction is set. The failure to involve women in decision-making may prove detrimental to the existence of an equitable society.

According to a survey conducted between 2006 and 2008 by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), female and male legislators have different interests in, and perspectives on, life. Most female policymakers share certain general interests and concerns, and feel that they have a responsibility to represent women. Men also believe that women's political priorities are different from theirs. The differences in the preferences of women vs. men may reflect their own life experiences. For example, data collected by IPU in 1992 highlight the fact that women are most numerous in the parliamentary committees in the areas of family, social affairs, health, and education in countries in Western Europe - areas related to women's traditional role in the family. Nevertheless, there may be little influence of female policymakers on policy if there are too few women represented in politics. At the very least, the more women there are in parliament, the easier it is to address women's issues and to change the gender dynamics in the chamber.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays that address topics regarding female policymakers and their influences on policy outcomes. Each of the three essays is described in more detail below.

Essay One. In the first essay, I investigate the effect of female legislators on educational expenditures among 19 OECD countries between 1960 and 2005. Specifically, I study the extent to which different contexts may weaken or strengthen the impact of women's representation on policy. The contexts taken into account are mostly political factors that do not vary significantly within countries, such as left-wing government intensity, electoral rule, the parliamentary system, the form of government, and the political cycle. I also consider whether non-marriage raises the extent of women's involvement in politics. Since many of these contextual factors do not vary within countries, a group fixed effect approach rather than a country fixed effect approach is used.

The baseline results suggest that the greater the representation of women in parliament, the higher the educational expenditures both as a percentage of GDP and in per capita terms. I then consider how each context modifies this relationship. To begin, traditional wisdom states that left-wing governments prefer more public education than right-wing governments.

Moreover, the rise in female labor force participation, which may parallel a rise in women's participation in politics, makes women more likely to favor the left. However, the results show that the presence of a left-wing government does not influence the effect of female legislators on policy. Actually, more female legislators result in higher educational expenditures, given that the government has an average left-wing intensity. Although in the literature, electoral rules have been believed to be the force behind the increasing representation of women, our results show that electoral rules do not strengthen the effect of female legislators. Nevertheless, the results also imply that the fraction of female legislators provides the same information as electoral rules, since the partial effect of female legislators in the regression including electoral rules becomes insignificant. Another context considered is the presence of a unicameral system, which should have a positive impact on educational expenditures, since the power is weighted toward urban areas, and may affect the level of female legislators, since more policies share women's responsibility in the family and therefore women may have more time for professional career. Controlling for unicameral system preserves a relevant effect of female legislators on policy. I thus control for government form. The results after this control show that the number of female legislators remains relevant to educational expenditures. Even though a presidential regime has a negative effect on educational expenditures, the effect is positive when the parliament introduces female legislators. I further examine whether the assumption behind this study, i.e.,

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the identity of th legislator matters for policy, is reasonable or not by controlling for the length of terms in office. It has been suggested that if elections are held more frequently, the accountability of politicians is stronger and policy decisions should thereby reflect median voters' preferences. The results show that accountability of politicians does not influence policy decisions, which supports the assumption that the identity of the legislator matters for policy. Finally, women's political preferences are hypothesized to depend upon their marriage status based on the assumption that marriage transfers resources from men to women. I therefore examine whether an increase in the divorce rate strengthens women's influence on educational policies. When the divorce rate is considered, it is clear that the effect of female legislators is robust with regard to education policy.

Essay Two. In the second essay, I re-examine the theoretical prediction of the growth model in Vandenbussche, Aghion, and Meghir (henceforth VAM) (2006). The model states that among countries with similar distances to the technological frontier, those countries with more skilled labor will have higher growth rate. I use the proportion of female legislators as an instrument for skilled labor, in contrast to VAM (2006) who used lagged educational expenditures. It seems reasonable to expect that, at lower stages of economic development, women support educational policies related to people's basic needs, such as increasing the schooling accessibility and literacy rate. In contrast, at higher stages of development, it is more likely that women will support policies for improving the quality of education after the infrastructure of compulsory education is well-established. Increasing the accessibility to higher education may be one of the directives for women in more developed economies.

Access to higher education is important not only for knowledge development, but also to address long-standing inequalities. In a developed country, women's' attention may focus on issues related to higher education more than on policies about primary and secondary education, and the representation of female legislators may play a role in setting that focus. In other words, women may have an effect on policies pertaining to higher education, and thereby exert influences on the levels of human capital. This essay, therefore, exploits the fact that women's political involvement affects the fraction of people with higher education through the budget process, and thereby affects 10-year growth, but may not be itself driven by future growth. I use the level of female legislators as an instrument of the fraction of people with higher education, and study the effect of human capital on growth. I investigate 19 OECD countries between 1960 and 2000 and find results that are very similar to results of VAM (2006). This finding thus suggests that their instrument, lagged educational expenditures, is, in fact, a credible instrument.

Essay Three. The third essay analyzes the effect of gender quotas on the share of female legislators and policy outcomes. Most developing countries introduced electoral gender quotas during 1990s, mainly as a result of the UN Conference on Women, held in Beijing. In contrast, most developed countries adopted gender quotas 10 or 15 years prior to the Conference. According to the critical mass argument proposed by Kanter (1977), the influence of female legislators on policy decisions is not negligible when there is a significant presence of women in the legislature. Quota systems therefore aim to ensure that women constitute a certain number or percentage of the members of a body. While the existing empirical studies focus on the effect of political reservations on policy outcomes in the cases of individual countries, it is also of great interest to know whether quotas work in general. I include as many countries as possible in this study and also consider countries with both the fast track and the incremental track, as defined by Dahlerup (2006). While the incremental track, such that employed in Scandinavia, consists of a gradual increase in women's overall resources and on gradual historical changes in the perceptions of womanhood, the fast track represents a historical leap forward in women's representation, as is present in Latin America.

The dataset contains observations from 103 countries between 1970 and 2006. Policy

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outcomes assessed include consolidated central government expenditures on general public service, defense, health, education, housing, economic affairs, and social services and welfare, and these are used to provide a general view of women's concerns and take into account budget balance. I estimate the model using a Difference-in-Difference approach. The results of two observations for each country suggest that there is an effect of gender quotas on the representation of female legislators, and there is a reduced form effect of gender quotas on government expenditures on social welfare. Moreover, a Two Stage Least Squares approach suggests that gender quotas may influence policy outcomes through their effect on the proportion of female legislators. The effect of gender quotas is robust with the controls for civil wars, OECD countries, and time trends. However, more observations would help investigate the effect of women in politics on policy outcomes because female legislators in countries with the fast track of gender equality may not, as of yet, have exerted effects on policy outcomes.

To summarize, my thesis provides a view of women's role as policymakers on a cross- country basis. In the first essay, I take educational policy as the outcome of interest and examine the effect of female legislators on total educational expenditures among 19 OECD countries between 1960 and 2005. The main contribution of this essay is to control for a number of political contexts, such as electoral rule and government form. Controlling for these variables allows me to study the interaction between contextual variables and female legislators, which clearly cannot be addressed with data from an individual country. In the second essay, I consider the same 19 OECD countries, but with a shorter time period for the purpose of providing comparable results with VAM (2006). Here, the main contribution is to use the proportion of female legislators as an instrument for skilled labor, i.e., the fraction of people with higher education. In the third essay, I discuss the issue of gender quotas, which has been suggested to be responsible for the increasing representation of women in politics. I investigate the impact of quotas on different policy outcomes in 103 countries, including developed and developing countries, between 1970 and 2006. Overall, this thesis may constitute an area for future research of women's impact on the economy through politics.

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