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Postdoctoral Fellow
Vittoria Offeddu is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Bocconi Covid Crisis Lab and Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. She is an infectious disease epidemiologist focused on pathogen surveillance, One Health, an ...
Alice Dominici joined Dondena in September 2023 to work on the ERC project FRAILIFE, which investigates the effect on child disability on family members and peers. Her research interests lie at the frontier of different social sciences. In addit ...
She is a Ph.D. candidate at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Her dissertation research focuses on poverty and family dynamics, with a special attention to single parenthood. She works for the ERC project ExpPov that studies the causes and con ...
Predoctoral Researcher
Elena Neri is a predoctoral researcher working on the ERC project FRAILIFE, which investigates the impact of child disability on family members and peers. Currently completing a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences with a BSc in International Po ...
Konstantin Bogatyrev is a PhD researcher at Bocconi University, pursuing a research career in political science. In his dissertation, Konstantin investigates voter accountability mechanisms in response to socially conservative and illiberal political ...
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lorenzo is a post-Doctoral research fellow at Bocconi University, a research fellow at the Center for Health Emergencies (Bruno Kessler Foundation), and a data science research consultant at the World Bank in the Data Analytics team.His research focu ...
PhD Student
Dirck de Kleer is a PhD Student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University. He studies when and why citizens and politicians shift between liberal and illiberal political attitudes and behaviors. He currently works on the ERC-fun ...
2024 - n° 158 01/02/2024

Despite the efforts to reduce gender gaps, women are still under-represented among politicians. This paper suggests a new channel to explain female disadvantage in electoral success related to politicians’ ability to extend their electorate and attract voters from opponent parties. I rely on Swiss elections exploiting several features of this setting. This electoral system is based on open lists (voters can select candidates within their favorite party), and it allows cross-voting (voters can also select candidates from lists other than their favorite). Furthermore, electoral registers report the amount of preference votes collected by each politician separately by the voter’s favorite party. I show that individual preference votes are an essential driver of gender differences in candidates ’success. Interestingly, while no gender gap emerges in preferences cast by party supporters, male politicians collect more preference votes through cross-voting than females, i.e. they are more successful in persuading voters from competing parties. Motivated by several mechanisms, these new results bring salient policy implications concerning the impact of electoral systems on female representation.

Giulia Savio
Keywords: gender gap, preference votes, open lists, cross-voting, panachage, elections
Associate Professor
Aleksandra Torbica, MSc, PhD is associate professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Bocconi University. She is President-Elect of the European Health Economics Association (EuHEA). She earned her MSc degree in Health Economics, ...