Candidate Gender Quotas and Campaign Spending in Open-List Proportional Representation Systems: The Case of Chile

ABSTRACT

This research note analyzes the effect of a candidate gender quota in Open-List Proportional Systems and its interaction with electoral spending. Focusing on the Chilean parliamentary elections of 2017, our evidence shows, first, that the quota law was effective in promoting the representation of women, but, second, the differences in the electoral performance between men and women grew considerably nevertheless. We argue that this result was due mainly to gender inequality in access to resources to finance electoral campaigns. Third, we found that this inequality exists only for candidates who are challenging incumbents, but not for the incumbents themselves: incumbent women are as competitive as men.

KEYWORDS:

• Proportional representation
• gender quotas
• campaign spending
• elections
• Chile

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Electability rate is the ratio between the number of elected candidates and the total number of candidates that competed. For example, if 100 women compete in an election and only 5 are elected, then the electability rate of women is 5%.

2. The campaign expenditure data were taken from the official site of the Chilean Electoral Service. https://www.servel.cl/ingresos-y-gastos-de-candidatos/. This shows the expenses of each candidate by item. The percentages are calculated as each item’s proportion of the total expenditure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico [Grant Nr. 1170944].