Replication Data for: Strengthening the Party, Weakening the Women: Unforeseen Consequences of Strengthening Institutions

The party politics literature suggests that an institutionalized party system can be key for well-functioning democracies. Do the benefits of strong parties also extend to women's descriptive representation? We argue that increasing parties' strength can perpetuate and even intensify parties' pre-existing patterns of exclusion of particular groups, including women, when elites are gender-biased. While stronger parties are better able to carry out their organizational goals, we contend that increasing gender equity is often not part of such goals. To evaluate this argument, we combine an exogenous electoral reform that increased parties' ability to control their members in Brazil with a regression discontinuity design. We find that while the reform increased parties' ability to pursue their organizational goals, it increased the gap in votes between men and women. Further, we demonstrate that the behavior of men towards women co-partisans drives this pattern. These findings highlight the unintended consequences of institutional engineering.

政党政治研究领域的文献指出，制度化的政党体系对于良善运转的民主政体而言是关键要素。那么强势政党的益处是否同样能够延伸至女性的描述性代表（descriptive representation）？本文主张，当政治精英存在性别偏见时，强化政党实力可能会延续甚至加剧政党此前已存在的对特定群体（包括女性）的排斥模式。尽管实力更强的政党更有能力实现其组织目标，但我们认为，提升性别公平通常并非这类目标的组成部分。为验证上述主张，我们将巴西一项能够提升政党对其成员管控能力的外生选举改革，与断点回归设计（regression discontinuity design）相结合。研究结果显示，尽管该改革提升了政党实现其组织目标的能力，但却拉大了男性与女性之间的得票差距。进一步的分析表明，男性同党同僚对女性的行为倾向是该现象的驱动因素。上述研究结果凸显了制度设计可能带来的意外后果。