The gendered aftershocks of crises

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Ximena Calo, a PhD candidate at Bocconi University.

Do natural disasters systematically disadvantage women politicians, and through what channels? I argue that crises activate masculine-coded leadership stereotypes, producing a voter penalty against women candidates that propagates through the candidate pool over multiple electoral cycles. Using Chile's 2010 Maule earthquake within a triple-differences design across six municipal council elections, I show that women candidates in high-exposure municipalities experienced a significant decline in their vote shares after the disaster—a penalty that does not fade across consecutive cycles. This perpetuation reflects two distinct processes operating at different speeds, governed by parties' internal selection institutions. In parties with centralized candidate selection, voters impose a sharp penalty in the first post-disaster election that subsequently attenuates as crisis salience recedes. In parties with decentralized selection, women withdraw from candidacy and local branches reduce nominations, generating slow-burn candidate-pool erosion that compounds over electoral cycles. Additional tests rule out retrospective accountability: the penalty does not concentrate on incumbent women with governing records, does not vary with the pace of post-disaster reconstruction, and is not driven by differential resource allocation to women-led municipalities. A positive economic shock of comparable salience—the mid-2000s copper boom—produces no comparable gender gap, distinguishing crisis-specific stereotype activation from generic accountability. As climate change increases the frequency of natural disasters, these findings suggest that the political costs of climate vulnerability represent a barrier to gender parity in elected office.

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