An Institutional Explanation for Representation Gaps

• In Event: Interesting Approaches to Gender Representation

Abstract

Women and ethnoracial minorities are descriptively underrepresented in many democracies. Scholars attribute these representational gaps to a variety of factors, ranging from unrepresentative electoral pipelines and differential running rates to resource disparities and voter prejudice. In this paper, we test an institutional explanation for why women and people of color are underrepresented in Brazil. We exploit exogenous variation in the size of local assemblies to identify the causal effect of district magnitude on candidate emergence and success for women and people of color, both independently as well as interactively. We find that women and Afro-Brazilians are more likely to run for public office in high-magnitude districts, but women (whites and Afro-Brazilians) are less likely to win because of resource disparities. These results suggest that increasing district magnitude creates the conditions for greater descriptive representation, but show that it is not always realized.

Authors

• Andrew Janusz, University of Florida

• Patrick Cunha Silva, Loyola University, Chicago