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Female policymakers and educational expenditures: cross-country evidence

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Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of women in politics on decision-making using public educational expenditures as the outcome of interest. The results suggest that an increase in the share of female legislators by one percentage point increases the ratio of educational expenditures to GDP by 0.038 percentage points. I then consider some different contexts, under which the influence of female legislators may be affected. The effect of female legislators on educational policies is robust in the different contexts considered, but the magnitude may change revealing perhaps that the distribution of female legislators depends on the context. Moreover, this study supports the hypothesis that the identity of the legislator matters for policy. To determine whether female legislators have causal impact on education, this paper uses electoral rules as the instrument for the proportion of female legislators. The results are encouraging, and are very likely to provide causal evidence of female legislators on educational expenditures.

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Notes

  1. Data collected by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in 1992 highlight the fact that the parliamentary committee on education is one of the areas in which female legislators are most numerous among countries in Western Europe.

  2. In the book “How Women Legislate”, Thomas states that “… For most women, their public sphere role was only half of their job; they continued to bear the major responsibility for home and health. Given this dual role, it is not surprising that women have used their latitude to participate in the legislative arena to make private sphere issues legitimate governmental concerns”.

  3. “Unmarried mothers and fathers can, if mutually agreed upon, reallocate custodial rights so as to mimic the marital situation.” See Edlund et al. (2005).

  4. See Browning et al. (1994).

  5. For example, Clots-Figueras (2012).

  6. Schwindt-Bayer (2007) points out that countries need to ensure that women are in the candidate pool by encouraging women to continue their education beyond secondary school and get degrees in professional fields that can be springboards to a political career such as a law degree, or by getting more women into the paid labor force and providing leadership training such that they can hold managerial positions.

  7. The results using the average fraction of female parliamentarians in both the upper and lower houses are similar to the results using only the fraction of female parliamentarians in the lower house.

  8. Their results become statistically significant after substituting group dummies for country dummies. Statistical efficiency may provide a good reason for this.

  9. See Chen (2010).

  10. There are 19 countries and 12 data points for each country in the dataset. Thus, there should be 228 observations in total, but missing values in some variables reduce the number of observations in the following estimations.

  11. Legal origins may be also taken into account when forming groups. For example, Canada and U.S. adopt common law, and are grouped together. See Porta et al. (2008).

  12. The series after 1995 is collected from the website of IPU.

  13. Education expansion in these dataset considers the need to expand and/or improve educational provision at all levels, and excludes technical training.

  14. Persson and Tabellini (2003) only considers legislative elections in lower house. The value of Majoritarian equals 0 if the system is either strict proportionality or mixed.

  15. According to Persson and Tabellini (2003), most semi-presidential and premier-presidential systems are classified as parliamentary. Countries are categorized as having a presidential regime if the existence of a government is without a confidence requirement. For example, France is a parliamentary regime since the legislature has an exclusive and unrestricted right of censure, even though the president is elected directly.

  16. Most of the countries examined had a stable parliamentary system during the sample period except for Spain and Sweden. Spain switched from a unicameral system to a bicameral system in 1977, and Sweden switched from a bicameral system to a unicameral system in 1970.

  17. Term is fixed at 3 years in New Zealand, 4 years in Norway, 4 years in Switzerland, and 2 years in the US.

  18. Non-marriage status includes also non-marital fertility and cohabitation. This paper only takes divorce rate into account because Edlund and Pande (2002) suggests that the rise in the divorce rate in recent decades in Western society leads women to prefer different policies from men if men transfer resources to women in marriage.

  19. Since there are 19 countries in the sample and only 10 observations in each country, it has been suggested to ignore country trends when country dummies are included.

  20. The same structure applies to all of the following tables. In addition, the number of observations in Tables 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 is varied due to the data availability of each context. As a result, even though the baseline results in column (1) of Tables 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are obtained according to the same specification, they are not completely the same as that in column (4) of Table 1.

  21. It is found that corruption is less severe where women hold a larger share of seats in parliament. See, e.g. Dollar et al. (2001) and Afridi et al. (2017).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Professor Per Pettersson-Lidbom for his advice and support.

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  1. Department of Urban Industrial Management and Marketing, University of Taipei, Taipei, 111, Taiwan

    Li-Ju Chen

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Chen, LJ. Female policymakers and educational expenditures: cross-country evidence. Eur J Law Econ 51, 129–155 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-020-09673-3

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