📈Political economy | Gender and politics | Representation 📈
My research investigates when women's presence in politics translates into substantive change, and how institutional filters and external shocks either expand or constrain women's empowerment. I employ quantitative methods and causal inference.
Selected Work in Progress:
"The Political Aftershocks of Natural Disasters: Gender Penalties in Post-Crisis Elections"
Abstract:
Do natural disasters systematically disadvantage female politicians? Using a candidate-level panel of Chilean municipal elections (2004-2021) merged with seismic intensity measures from the 2010 Maule earthquake, I find that female candidates in high-exposure communes experienced an 8.9 percentage point decline in within-list vote share relative to male candidates, a penalty that also eroded their seat-winning margins. The effect emerged immediately and persisted for nearly a decade. The penalty extends to challengers with no governing record and is not explained by changes in party nomination strategies. A positive economic shock, the mid-2000s copper boom, produced no comparable gender gap, suggestive of crisis-specific stereotype activation rather than symmetric performance-based accountability. These findings foreground that climate-related disasters may threaten progress toward gender parity in elected office.
Presented at: APE Seminar, Stockholm University (February 2026).
Scheduled Presentations:
➔Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference 2026 (Chicago, USA - April 23rd-26th, 2026)
➔Bocconi-Unimi/NASP Joint Seminar Series in Political Science (University of Milan - May 29th, 2026)
➔EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium (PBC) (European University Institute - June 2nd, 2026)
➔European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) (Newcastle University - June 15th-17th, 2026)
➔European Political Science Society (EPSS) (Belfast, UK - June 18th-20th, 2026)
➔American Political Science Association (APSA) (Boston, USA - September 3rd-6th, 2026)
Working Paper:
"Political Selection and Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences," with P. Profeta, R. Puglisi, S. Scabrosetti
Abstract:
➔Women and men differ systematically in their policy preferences, yet political elites often do not. This raises a central question for theories of representation: does descriptive representation translate into substantive differences in policy preferences or are these differences filtered out by political selection? Using harmonized cross-national data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Candidate Survey across 21 European countries (2002–2021), we compare gender gaps in policy preferences among voters, candidates, and elected officials. Across a wide range of economic and policy domains, gender gaps are large among voters, substantially smaller among candidates, and vanish among elected officials. This convergence is asymmetric: women’s preferences among political elites move toward those of men. Gender gaps are already small among first-time candidates and do not systematically vary with political experience or party tenure, consistent with political selection rather than socialization. Same-sex rights constitute a clear exception. On this identity-linked issue, gender gaps persist across political roles, with female politicians maintaining consistently progressive positions. Overall, political selection strongly limits the extent to which descriptive representation translates into substantive policy differences.
Presented at (*** by coauthors): Italian Political Science Association (SISP) 2025 Conference (Naples, September 2025); ***Italian Society of Public Economics (SIEP) 2025 Conference (Naples, September 2025); CIVICA Political Behavior and Institutions (PoBI) 2025 Conference (Vienna, Austria).