Female presence in local government and cost efficiency: the case of Italian municipalities

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how female presence in political institutions influences local governments’ cost efficiency, implementing a one-stage stochastic frontier model, based on a panel of Italian municipalities, with municipal fixed effects. The empirical results provide significant evidence for the presence of a gender effect in politics: higher efficiency is observed in municipalities with a female mayor and a greater presence of women in their councils. Further, the gender effect is confirmed taking into account the regional perspective, that is, the historic North–South Italian dualism, and performing several robustness checks. The empirical results support the usefulness of policies aimed at favouring female empowerment and at promoting gender equality in politics.

KEYWORDS:

• gender
• female empowerment
• local governance
• efficiency
• Italian municipalities

JEL:

• D61
• H70
• J16

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not involve the responsibility of the corresponding institutions. Although the authors alone are responsible for what is written in this paper, thanks are extended to Marco Stradiotto and all the members of Centro Studi SOSE SpA.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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

Notes

1. The effectiveness of public regulations aimed at favouring female empowerment in politics is still an open debate (e.g., Baltrunaite et al., 2014, 2019).

2. For an additional survey of the existing literature on local governments’ efficiency, see Aiello and Bonanno (2019).

3. For evidence about the effect of female representation on Cabinet duration, see Krauss and Kroeber (2021).

4. Among the different parametric functional forms, the translog function is the most commonly used in the empirical applications, and it represents a generalization of the Cobb–Douglas function, which assumes homogeneity, unitary elasticity of substitution between inputs and separability.

5. For a review of stochastic frontier models, see Ferrara (2020).

6. Italy is divided into 15 ordinary statute regions (OSRs) and five at special statute regions (SSRs), mainly differing in financing. We focus exclusively on OSRs, limiting the potential bias related to the different organization that such regions can self-regulate independently (Braga & Scervini, 2017).

7. Municipalities’ expenditure and output data are provided by the database OpenCivitas, an initiative promoted by the Ministry of Economy and Finance and SOSE. The project was born with Law 42/2009 and Legislative Decree 216/2010 with the aim of defining for Italian municipalities the standard expenditure needs, in relation to territorial features and socio-demographic characteristics of the resident population. Such values, used to distribute intergovernmental funds in an equitable and transparent way, are collected through a detailed questionnaire for municipalities in different waves: 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2016, which are our years of analysis.

8. The weights were obtained through BoD approach.

9. See note 8.

10. For territory services, eight micro-outputs have been used: environmental ordinances, authorizations conceded, reports faced, opinions of environmental compatibility, competitive bidding procedures and direct commitments, pruned plants during the year, new trees planted, and cleaning of rivers and streams. The micro-outputs used for viability are nine: projects, operations management, progress status and final status, trials, competitive bidding procedures and direct commitments, contracts, salt interventions and snowplough, concessions of public land for construction or archaeological site, and disabled parking and accesses for traffic-restricted zone allowed or renewed during the year.

11. The potential spatial heterogeneity in prices is mitigated by the presence of a public company (Consip SpA) which centralizes public procurement in Italy.

12. In our sample, the total expenditure for essential services is €683 per capita on average in 2016, while the total public expenditure accounts for about €14,000 per capita, and the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is about €26,000 in the same year (Eurostat, 2022).

13. We estimated the three model specifications also using a balanced dataset and neither the signs nor the statistical significance of all the control variables change. The results are available from the authors upon request.

14. North regions: Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Lombardia, Piemonte and Veneto; Centre–South regions: Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Lazio, Marche, Molise, Puglia, Toscana and Umbria.

15. We perform the robustness check also on the subsample of bigger municipalities (i.e., those having more than 3000 inhabitants), which confirms that both the presence of a female mayor and a higher share of women in the municipal councils preserve their negative and significant effect on inefficiency. The results are available from the authors upon request.