📈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 Gendered Aftershocks of Crises: Evidence from Chile's 2010 Earthquake"
Abstract: Do natural disasters systematically disadvantage women politicians, and through what channels? I argue that crises activate masculine-coded leadership stereotypes, producing a voter penalty against women candidates that propagates through the candidate pool over multiple electoral cycles. Using Chile's 2010 Maule earthquake within a triple-differences design across six municipal council elections, I show that women candidates in high-exposure municipalities experienced a significant decline in their vote shares after the disaster---a penalty that does not fade across consecutive cycles. This perpetuation reflects two distinct processes operating at different speeds, governed by parties' internal selection institutions. In parties with centralized candidate selection, voters impose a sharp penalty in the first post-disaster election that subsequently attenuates as crisis salience recedes. In parties with decentralized selection, women withdraw from candidacy and local branches reduce nominations, generating slow-burn candidate-pool erosion that compounds over electoral cycles. Additional tests rule out retrospective accountability: the penalty does not concentrate on incumbent women with governing records, does not vary with the pace of post-disaster reconstruction, and is not driven by differential resource allocation to women-led municipalities.
Presented at: 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 23rd–26th, 2026); "New Approaches to Studying the Gender Gap" Workshop, SNF Agora Academy at Johns Hopkins University (March 2026); APE Seminar, Stockholm University (February 2026).
Scheduled Presentations:
➔ 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)
"Filtered Out: 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, 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.
Paper available upon request.
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).