Historical Family Types and Female Political Representation: Persistence and Change

Article Abstract:
This paper argues that the way families were organized in premodern Europe exerts lasting consequences for women’s political engagement. In “stem families” cohabitation with mothers-in-law allowed adult women to share responsibility for domestic production and engage in paid employment. In “nuclear families” newlyweds created new households, forcing wives to specialize in domestic production. To examine the long term effects of unequal gendered division of labor, we combine historical census data with municipality-level election data from Spain between 1978 and 2015. Although historical family types vanished in the twentieth century, former stem-family regions show higher female labor force participation, more progressive gender attitudes, and higher female political representation. We also investigate the way voluntary party quotas counteracted political discrimination against women in regions formerly populated by nuclear families. By focusing on historical family structure, we uncover an original cause of female political underrepresentation in Europe and shed light on both historical persistence and change.