Women’s representation in Brazilian local politics : Why do some regions elect more women than others?

Abstract: Women’s political representation is often investigated through cross-national comparisons. Such studies generally focus on women’s political representation at the national level, assuming that countries are homogenous units. However, structural and cultural differences are many times just as large within countries as they are between them. Modernization theory suggests that women’s political representation will increase with development, something that a number of previous studies on primarily Western countries find support for. In order to see if this theory is applicable also on a developing country like Brazil, this quantitative study compares the aggregated share of locally elected women (dependent variable) in 136 Brazilian regions in the 2012 municipal elections with levels of log GDP per capita, population density and female labor force participation (independent variables). In contrast to previous studies on Western countries, the results of this study find no support for the ideas of modernization theory. With moderate correlation, this study actually indicates that higher values of GDP per capita and female labor force participation have negative effects on women’s political representation at the local level in the compared Brazilian regions. Population density was not found to have any substantial effect on women’s political representation.