📈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:
"Gendered Aftershocks: The 2010 Earthquake and Women's Electoral Fortunes in Chile"
Abstract: Do natural disasters systematically disadvantage women politicians? I argue that crises activate masculine-coded leadership stereotypes, producing a voter penalty against women candidates that operates independently of any record in office. Using Chile's 2010 Maule earthquake and candidate-level records from six municipal council elections (2004--2024), I compare women and men competing on the same lists across more and less affected municipalities before and after the disaster. Women candidates in highly affected municipalities lost electoral support relative to men, a penalty that emerges in the first post-earthquake election, persists, and leaves fewer women on affected councils. The evidence points to stereotype activation rather than performance evaluation. Women challengers, who have no record to judge, are penalized as much as women overall, and the penalty does not track the local disaster response. The penalty also reaches the candidate pool, which tilts toward men after the earthquake. Where centralized selection held the candidate pool fixed, women still lost votes, isolating the voter response. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, the gendered electoral penalties they produce may become an underappreciated and self-reinforcing barrier to gender parity in elected office.
Presented at: Women in Leadership: Accelerating Development Outcomes Conference (LSE – September 2026); American Political Science Association (APSA) (Boston, USA – September 2026); European Political Science Society (EPSS) (Belfast, UK – June 2026); European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) (Newcastle University – June 2026); EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium (PBC) Seminar Series (June 2026); Bocconi-UniMi/NASP Joint Seminar Series in Political Science, University of Milan (May 2026); 83rd MPSA Conference (Chicago, USA – April 2026); "New Approaches to Studying the Gender Gap" Workshop, SNF Agora Academy at Johns Hopkins University (March 2026); APE Seminar, Stockholm University (February 2026).
"Filtered Out: Political Selection and Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences" | joint with P. Profeta, R. Puglisi, S. Scabrosetti | Under Review
Abstract: Women and men differ systematically in their policy preferences, but it is unclear whether these differences persist among political elites or are attenuated through the political process. Using harmonized data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Candidate Survey across 21 European countries between 2002 and 2021, we compare gender gaps in policy preferences among voters, candidates, and elected officials. Gender gaps are large among voters but attenuate sharply at the candidate stage and continue to compress among elected officials. They do not vary with party discipline, political experience, party tenure, or age at party entry, which aligns with the idea of selection at the point of candidacy. The policy domain of same-sex rights is an exception: gaps survive every stage, consistent with what we term a gendered analog of issue ownership. Our findings suggest that descriptive representation translates into substantive divergence only on dimensions where group-based preferences survive political selection
Presented at (* = by coauthors): *European Public Choice Society (EPCS) 2026 Conference (Madrid, March 2026); 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 Workshop (Vienna, Austria).