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.