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Looking inside the ballot box: gender gaps in Argentine presidential elections

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Abstract

Since women were given the right to vote in the first half of the twentieth century, several studies verify the existence of noticeable differences in women and men voting conduct. Theories explaining such behavior rely mainly on stereotypes, differences in values as well as disparities in self-perceptions of men and women. This paper, using a unique and unusual gender-segregated voting booths that was in use in Argentina until 2007, suggests that labor market incentives play a key role explaining the electoral gender gap. Our estimations, which come out from a panel data of five presidential elections at district level, show that the voting gender gap reduces as women acquire the head of household status. That is, as women face analogous incentives to men, their evaluation of the incumbent performance and their policies tend to be similar to males leading to a reduction in the gender gap.

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Fig. 1

Source: own calculations based on data from Dirección Nacional Electoral. Vertical axe is expressed in percentages and horizontal axe is Presidential Election year. Due to missing data, boxes were computed using 24 districts for 1983; 20 districts for 1989 and 1995; 18 districts for 2003 and 17 districts for 1999 and 20 for 2007

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Notes

  1. As stated by Inglehart and Norris (2000) gender gap is a multidimensional political phenomenon that can refer to any political differences between women and men, such as mass participation, differences in voting selections and in political party sympathy as well as in political and ideological matters (see also Conover 1988). In this paper we just focus on voting behavior.

  2. From the very first election that women participate in 1951, there were different polling places for men and women (Bercoff 2019).

  3. The obligation to vote is waived for those citizens that are 500 km outside their legal residence. The amount of the fines to those citizens that fail to cast their vote are very low as well as the probability of being fined at all.

  4. Positive Votes are obtained by subtracting blank and spoiled ballots from Total Votes.

  5. Río Negro accounts for 1.4% of the total register voters. We also have missing data in two elections for the province of San Luis and in one election for the provinces of Chubut, Formosa, Salta and Tierra del Fuego.

  6. According to INDEC, the status of Head of Household is granted by the rest of the persons living in the house, and there is only one head per household.

  7. Researchers attribute the steady increase in the percentage of households headed by women to the breakup of the traditional family, including the rise in cohabitation, divorce and separation, non-marital childbearing, and lone motherhood (Liu et al. 2017). In addition, the decline in living standards and male wages associated to the economic contraction of the 1980s may have also contributed to the formation female headship (United Nations 1991).

  8. Members of the Chamber of Deputies are elected on closed party lists from multi-member electoral districts (the provinces) using proportional representation, with the entire Chamber renewing by halves (one-half of the province’s legislative delegation) every two years.

  9. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this placebo test.

  10. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting us this specification as robustness check.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Julio Elias and participants of the Regional Science Association International Meeting (SAER) and Argentine Economic Association Meeting (AAEP) for comments and suggestions to earlier version of this paper and to Laia Kaliman, Franco Domínguez Paredes and Agostina Zulli for their research assistance. All remaining errors are ours.

Funding

This work was supported by the Secretaría de Ciencia, Arte e Innovación Tecnológica de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Argentina (CIUNT) Grant PIUNT 26/F 612.

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  1. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina

    José Javier Bercoff & Osvaldo Meloni

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  1. José Javier Bercoff
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José J. Bercoff and Osvaldo Meloni wrote and reviewed the whole manuscript text.

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Correspondence to José Javier Bercoff.

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Appendix

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Bercoff, J.J., Meloni, O. Looking inside the ballot box: gender gaps in Argentine presidential elections. Int Rev Econ 70, 237–255 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-023-00417-8

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