Women's candidatures in local elections: does the context matter? Empirical evidence from Italian municipalities

A long tradition of electoral studies focuses on the effects of the social context on political participation (Marsh, 2002; Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1993). At the same time, an equally fertile line of research applies to the determination of the main causes of the gap of women in political representation. This article is located at the crossroads of these two fields of research. Its purpose is to illustrate how context variables can determine female candidate quota. In order to investigate the relationship between the quota of female candidatures and a plurality of social and economic variables related to context, a specification of the Correlated Random Effect (CRE) model has been applied to a panel. Indeed, this model allows to consider together time variant and time invariant variables. Data refer to municipal elections in Italy from 2009 to 2016. This period is particularly interesting since in 2012 an electoral reform became law that provides some gender rebalancing mechanisms in municipal elections.