This paper asks whether local government policy priorities shape women’s decisions to run for office and offers evidence on how municipal spending patterns relate to women’s emergence as candidates. Using Brazilian municipal-level variation, the authors link policy outputs and communal spending to the number and composition of entrants, arguing that women’s interest in running varies across place and time rather than being uniform.
Bold scan: Women’s emergence, municipal spending patterns, 70,000 Brazilian candidates, communal policy priorities
Data and methods
The study analyzes over 70,000 Brazilian candidates together with municipal spending patterns to evaluate relationships between local policy outputs and candidate entry. The abstract describes a place- and time-varying approach to link communal spending priorities to who chooses to run, but does not list specific statistical models or identification strategies in the abstract.
Main findings
The authors report consistent evidence that communal spending patterns at the local level predict women’s emergence as candidates, indicating that women’s interest in pursuing political office varies across places and over time. The abstract emphasizes that communal policy priorities help explain variation in female candidate entry but preserves qualifications about geographic and temporal heterogeneity.
- The analysis draws on a large candidate-level dataset (over 70,000 Brazilian candidates).
- Results focus on municipal spending and other local policy outputs as predictors of women’s entrance into politics.
