Gender quotas, female representation, and public expenditures: Evidence from Flanders

Over the past 15 years, various legislative steps have been taken in Belgium – including quota rules for election lists and a mandated minimal representation requirement in municipal legislative bodies – towards the equalisation of male and female representation in the political sphere. At the local level, such laws are not only exogenously imposed by higher-level governments, but also generate varying constraints across space and time. This paper exploits these legal changes to identify whether, and how, local government expenditures are affected by the gender of local politicians. The dataset includes 299 (out of 308) Flemish municipalities over the period 1998-2008. We find, in line with previous studies, that a larger share of women in the municipal population is linked to higher local government expenditures. Interestingly, however, higher female representation in the local parliament and/or government is not associated with higher spending (and, if anything, tends to decrease it in the short term), and does not appear to create substantive shifts in spending patterns.

JEL Codes: D70; H40; H72; J16

Keywords: Representative Democracy, Local Public Expenditure, Gender Quotas.