The promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women are global policy priorities across countries and development institutions. Research on gender and politics shows that exceptional environments can activate stereotypes of women as honest, trustworthy, and competent lawmakers in public health and, in doing so, can generate increased public support for female political candidates. We argue that the 2019–2020 Coronavirus Pandemic has the potential to produce this outcome, as recent public opinion polls highlight widespread discontent with male-led governments’ responses to the pandemic and elevated concerns surrounding public health. Recent positive media reports of female world leaders’ responses to the pandemic provide further reason to suspect a forthcoming increase in political support for female candidates. We posit that such an outcome may prove essential not only for enhancing development and improving long-standing gender inequities but also for alleviating the pandemic’s disproportionately allocated hardships.

This article reevaluates often-made assumptions of retrospective voting and voter irrationality in studies of voting behavior in political contexts colored by haphazard, apolitical events. To do so, it leverages the quasi-random 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Brazil and the accompanying priming of “women’s issues” relating to infant health to empirically assess whether exposure to the virus increased political support for female candidates in the 2016 Brazilian local elections. Results of difference-in-difference analyses suggest that high incidences of the virus in the months immediately preceding the election increased female candidates’ vote shares. Conflicting with theories of irrational retrospective voting, the results are consistent with an understudied theory of rational prospective voting. Robustness and falsification tests and dubious support for alternative explanations lend additional support to the argument. The research contributes to an elucidation of both the complex calculations underlying voting behavior and the conditions favorable to female candidates’ electoral prospects.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions to increase physical distancing have been instrumental in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Governments have enacted stringent public health policies that impose limits on mobility outside the household. However, for containment policies to be effective, there is a growing understanding that emergency aid programs must be designed to ensure that the most vulnerable receive financial and in-kind aid resources to support their ability to “stay at home.” In this study, we use survey data from an Oxford  USP-FGV collaborative research initiative to empirically assess the effectiveness of these two policies in reducing mobility with an eye to those at-risk or living in conditions of poverty in eight Brazilian capitals. We learn that, in general, neither stringent public health policies and receipt nor promised receipt of the Auxílio Emergencial were effective in limiting mobility outside of the home. We do, however, find limited evidence that receipt or promised receipt of the Auxílio Emergencial marginally limited non-work trips outside of the home, especially in city/state combinations with stringent public health policies. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of our findings.

The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged countries across Latin America. Although the region continues to suffer, the promise of vaccinations provides reason for hope. As vaccines become more widely accessible in Latin America, public support for and willingness to receive the vaccine will be essential to pandemic recovery. Recognizing this, politicians in the region are already actively publicly promoting vaccination. In this research note, we explore Latin Americans’ attitudes on vaccine acceptance as well as the influence of political recruitment for vaccination and both consumption of and trust in news from politicians on self-reported attitudes of vaccine acceptance. We learn that, in general, Latin Americans are receptive to vaccination but that acceptance varies as a function of country, time, and recruitment and, interestingly, that Latin Americans are actually dissuaded from vaccination if encouraged by politicians. We conclude with a discussion and a plea that vaccination campaigns remain separate from political ones.

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of the Brazilian “Maria da Penha” Law—a law that imposed criminal sanctions on and promoted rehabilitation programs for known perpetrators of acts of domestic violence exclusively against women, issued restraining orders against perpetrators, required perpetrators to surrender firearms, and established police units uniquely trained to address violence against women. Using difference-in-difference analyses estimated with data on Brazilian monthly assault-related hospitalizations and with gender as treatment variable, we find that the law contributed to a 22% reduction in assault-related hospitalizations among women as compared with men. Our data is collected from the Brazilian public healthcare system named Sistema Único de Saúde, which provides public information on detailed records of hospitalizations in Brazil. We provide robustness checks of our analyses and examine heterogeneous effects of the law. With respect to the latter, we deduce that the effectiveness of the law in reducing assault-related hospitalizations among women was especially pronounced in municipalities where women are most vulnerable to domestic violence. We conclude with a discussion of our results, with an eye to policy implications and areas for future research.