Female policymakers and educational expenditures: cross-country evidence
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Female policymakers and educational expenditures: cross‑country evidence Li‑Ju Chen1 Accepted: 21 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
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. Keywords Educational expenditures · Legislator · Gender · Political economy JEL Classification D78 · H52 · J16
1 Introduction A growing literature attempts to examine the gender differences in decision making process. Given that women and men play different roles in society and therefore have different interests and priorities, it follows that women’s decision may conflict with men’s. However, the empirical findings are inconsistent. In the field of law and courts, some scholars find insignificant or weak differences in sentencing patterns between male and female judges (e.g., Kritzer and Uhlman 1977; Gruhl et al. 1981), * Li‑Ju Chen [email protected] 1
Department of Urban Industrial Management and Marketing, University of Taipei, Taipei 111, Taiwan
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
European Journal of Law and Economics
but it may not be generalizable to the quite different context of decision-making by federal appellate judges (Songer et al. 1994). Personal characteristics and experiences are likely to influence how judges make decisions that female judges have been found to be more liberal in individual judicial behavior, and thus may show different perspective in deciding cases (e.g., Peresie 2005; Collins et al. 2010; Bourreau-Dubois et al. 2014; Desrieux and Espinosa 2019; Glynn and Sen 2015; Voeten 2020). Moreover, the presence of women as minority judges has been recognized to help predict panel decisions (e.g., Farhang and Wawro 2004; Peresie 2005; Boyd et al. 2010). Gender effect appears to exist in attorney behavior as well. Female lawyers have been suggested to impact jury decision making given their distinctive approach in interpreting the law and communicating legal arguments (Szmer et al. 2013). Their expertise in women’s issues and emotional oral argument may further result in justice
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