📈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: Gendered Electoral Penalties After Crisis"
Abstract: Do natural disasters systematically disadvantage female politicians? I study this question using Chile's 2010 earthquake and the country's open-list proportional representation system for municipal councils, in which voters choose among co-partisans on the same list. Using a candidate-level panel of Chilean municipal elections (2004-2021) and a triple-difference design exploiting geologically determined variation in disaster severity, I find that female candidates in high-exposure communes experienced a decline in within-list vote share relative to male candidates. The penalty appeared in the first post-earthquake election and persisted over the following decade. It extends to challengers with no governing record and is not explained by differential campaign financing. I additionally document a substantial supply-side withdrawal: the share of female candidates in high-exposure communes fell as women disproportionately exited candidacy after the earthquake. A positive economic shock - the mid-2000s copper boom - produced no comparable gender gap, consistent with crisis-specific stereotype activation rather than symmetric performance-based accountability. Climate-related disasters may thus constitute an underappreciated barrier to gender parity in elected office.
Paper available upon request.
Presented at: 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:
➔ 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)
"Filtered Out: Political Selection and Gender Gaps Among Political Elites," 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 filtered out through political selection. Using harmonized data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Candidate Survey across 21 European countries between 2002--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).
Paper available upon request.