The Second Sex in the Second District: The Policy Effects of Electing Women to County Government

Abstract

Research about women’s representation in county governments and whether women’s representation at the local level translates into different policy outcomes has been relatively unexplored (Holman 2017). Thus, we ask whether electing a woman to the county legislative body leads to different policy outputs, specifically in areas like education, health, hospitals, housing, and welfare. Our dataset builds on de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw’s (2020) work on county legislative elections by gender coding candidates, leading to a full dataset of nearly 16,500 gender-coded races for county legislative positions, thus creating the most comprehensive, gender-coded dataset of elections in county governments. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that electing a woman to the county’s governing body does not lead to greater spending generally or on social and redistributive policy. Yet there are specific conditions in which they can more easily advocate for their preferred fiscal preferences. For instance, under commission forms of government, electing a woman leads to increased expenditures on welfare. Moreover, electing women has a positive effect on spending when the county is receiving a greater proportion of revenue from higher levels of government.