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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.
We are happy to announce the launch of the new Dondena AI and Society Initiative (DAISI).
DAISI’s activities focus on the impact of AI on Society and on the application of AI and computational tools to Social Science research. DAISI's objective is to facilitate the contamination of Social Science research with knowledge from Computer Science and to act as a methodological support element for the research of other Dondena Researchers.
The three main activities of DAISI are:
1. connecting Bocconi researchers already experimenting with AI and computational applications to social science questions with the goal of exchanging experiences, issues and solutions through a brown bag informal seminar series where Bocconi researchers discuss their AI applications to social science research questions and a reading group for literature reviews of AI tools and application and for idea generation.
2. organizing mini courses and workshops led by Computer Science faculty aimed at helping Social Science researchers learn new AI and Computational advancements and their potential application to Social Science research.
3. inviting leading scholars doing cutting-edge research on these topics to spend 2/3 days at Dondena for a standard seminar and for short 2/4 hour courses/in-depth discussions wit the faculty/PhD students.
AI-generated photo of a large, vibrant daisy flower, the petals are made of intricately interwoven digital binary code in green and black, symbolizing the impact of AI on society. The center of the daisy is a globe representing the global influence of AI, with tiny digital screens showcasing various aspects of society such as education, healthcare and robotics around the globe.
The image was generated by openAI Dall-E in response to the following prompt: “I am a social science researcher organizing a research initiative about "AI and Society". The initiative will have the acronym DAISI reminding of the flower daisy. Can you generate the picture of a daisy that also contains references to the impact of artificial intelligence on society?”