Description:
In almost all countries, the majority of parliamentarians are male, often by a large degree. This largely reflects historical contingencies including the absence of universal suffrage and other forms of patriarchy. In recent decades, there has been a notable trend around the world towards greater representation of women in parliaments and, more generally, greater political participation by women. A natural question to ask is whether this affects political outcomes or government policies. A small but growing research literature has looked at this in several countries around the world, including India. These papers mostly consider policy outcomes associated with women’s interests and generally suggest that women’s interests are better represented with more women either in parliament or in government.

In this lecture we will consider a non-gender-based outcome: income inequality as measured by the Gini Index. There is considerable evidence that women are more egalitarian than men so, a priori, one might expect lower inequality where there are more women in parliament. We use fixed-effects panel data models on 140 countries between 1997 and 2021 to examine if this is the case. We find in general results consistent with this hypothesis: a higher share of women in parliament is indeed associated with lower income inequality. A more challenging question is whether this is a causal relationship & not just a correlation because of some omitted time-varying characteristic of countries. To address this, we use an Instrumental Variables estimator, leveraging some plausibly exogenous variation in the women’s share in parliament. This leads to a much larger estimated effect on women’s inequality. We conclude that greater political participation by women is likely to lead to more equal incomes.

Speaker Bio:
Prof. Kevin Denny is an Associate Professor in the School of Economics, UCD of which he is also the head.  He is also a fellow of the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy. He studied Economics in University College Dublin (1980-1984) and Nuffield College, Oxford (1984-86, 1987-1989). He had research posts in Oxford University 1986-87 and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London (1989-1992). He took up a position in UCD in 1992.  His research interests are in applied microeconomics, particularly education and labour markets. He has also published in health, political science, psychology and health journals.