Are female politicians more responsive to international crises?

Abstract

This article analyses bilateral foreign aid flows over the period 1973 to 2010 to investigate whether the gender composition of legislatures in donor nations affects the aid response to recipient country crises. Our findings suggest that donors with higher shares of women in office provide larger amounts of foreign aid in the wake of a disaster or war in a recipient nation. This response increases in size with the magnitude of the crisis and is especially pronounced for aid flows designated as disaster relief.

Keywords:

• female leaders
• foreign aid
• disasters
• conflict

JEL Classification:

• F35
• H84
• J16
• D70

Notes

¹ Similarly, a literature within experimental economics has documented differences in underlying preferences and behaviours across gender lines (Eckel and Grossman, 1998; Croson and Gneezy, 2009).

² Constitutional design refers to whether the government is presidential, mixed or parliamentary. Studies find that women are more likely to be elected in proportional representation systems, and mixed and parliamentary governments use such systems more commonly (e.g. Kenworthy and Malami, 1999).

³ An underlying concern for the identification of the legislator-specific impact is that there is an omitted factor – preferences of the donor country’s electorate – which affects both participation of women in the domestic political process and the amount of foreign aid committed. Private aid flows from the donor country should proxy for the aid preferences of the donor country’s electorate.

⁴ Hicks et al. (2014) provide causal evidence of this effect by showing that within country changes in the share of female representation lead to increased aid flows, primarily occurring through bilateral aid, which are robust to controlling for private aid flows and to instrumenting for female representation using female labour force participation.

⁵ One may be concerned that aid could drive conflict as Nunn and Qian (2014) find that once in a civil war, increases in US food aid prolong the duration of conflict, but have no effect on the occurrence of civil or international wars or on the duration of international conflicts. Our results are robust to the exclusion of the US, and Hicks et al. (2014) find that unlike most other forms of aid, female legislators have no impact on the level of food aid, which is perhaps more driven by domestic interest groups (see Milner and Tingley, 2010).