Take (Her) to the Limit: Term Limits do Not Diminish Women's Overperformance in Legislative Office

Holman, Mirya R.; Mahoney, Anna Mitchell

doi:10.1111/lsq.12406

“…Women in leadership positions are often held to different standards (Kaslovsky and Rogowski, 2022;O'Brien, 2015). Consequently, women are more selective in choosing when to run for office (Fulton et al, 2006;Lawless, 2015), and those who run end up outperforming men in both qualifications and performance across different activities (Bauer, 2020;Besley et al, 2017;Holman and Mahoney, 2022). This gendered political pipeline suggests the possibility that public office is disproportionately occupied by more risk-prone women.…”

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Women Running for Office Are Less Risk Averse Than Men. Evidence From Portugal

Magalhães,

Pereira

2023

Preprint

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Prior work shows that women are, on average, more risk averse than men. This evidence has been used to theorize about gender differences in elite behavior. However, whether differences in risk aversion hold among the subset of citizens willing to run for office remains an open question. We report a pre-registered experiment with parliamentary candidates in Portugal and find that women candidates are less risk averse than men candidates. This effect is driven by risk preferences in public investments and is not explained by gender differences in political experience. The findings are consistent with a process of gendered (self-)selection where women risk-takers are disproportionately attracted to enter a men-dominated career and run for office. Despite requiring future validation in different contexts, the evidence highlights the challenges of extrapolating from citizen samples to study elite behavior and suggests that risk perceptions are a relevant supply-side determinant of women representation.

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Term limits in parliament and electoral disconnection: the case of the Five Star Movement

Bromo,

Gambacciani,

Improta

2024

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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This article examines the relationship between term limits in parliament and “electoral disconnection,” the notion that legislators constrained in their ability to run for office face diminished incentives to perform strategic activities to boost their chances of securing candidacy and re-election. We leverage the case of the Italian Five Star Movement’s party-imposed limit of two terms for affiliates seeking to gain or retain a parliamentary seat. We exploit an original dataset of parliamentary activities covering both chambers of the Italian Parliament between 2013 and 2022. We estimate a series of mixed-effect regression models to assess the performance of MPs who were elected in 2013 and re-elected in 2018. In line with our expectations, the evidence suggests that term-limited representatives serving their second mandate tend to become less productive when it comes to “electorally lucrative” activities and more prone to rebelling than their non-term-limited colleagues. These findings contribute to our understanding of the incentives that drive parliamentary behavior.

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Women Running for Office Are Less Risk Averse than Men: Evidence from Portugal

Magalhães,

Pereira

2024

The Journal of Politics

1

0

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Prior work shows that women are, on average, more risk averse than men. This evidence has been used to theorize about gender differences in elite behavior. However, whether differences in risk aversion hold among the subset of citizens willing to run for office remains an open question. We report a pre-registered experiment with parliamentary candidates in Portugal and find that women candidates are less risk averse than men candidates. This effect is driven by risk preferences in public investments and is not explained by gender differences in political experience. The findings are consistent with a process of gendered (self-)selection where women risk-takers are disproportionately attracted to enter a men-dominated career and run for office. Despite requiring future validation in different contexts, the evidence highlights the challenges of extrapolating from citizen samples to study elite behavior and suggests that risk perceptions are a relevant supply-side determinant of women representation.Word count: 2,540 * We would like to thank André Freire, Viriato Queiroga, and António Valentim. Pre-analysis plan: https: //osf.io/tvpw6. All departures from the pre-analysis plan are highlighted in the text. Replication files are available in the JOP Data Archive on Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop).The empirical analysis has been successfully replicated by the JOP replication analyst

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Take (Her) to the Limit: Term Limits do Not Diminish Women's Overperformance in Legislative Office

Cited by 3 publications

References 40 publications

Women Running for Office Are Less Risk Averse Than Men. Evidence From Portugal

Women Running for Office Are Less Risk Averse Than Men. Evidence From Portugal

Term limits in parliament and electoral disconnection: the case of the Five Star Movement

Women Running for Office Are Less Risk Averse than Men: Evidence from Portugal

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