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Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?
Abstract
This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.
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Citations
Cites
A Rational Theory of the Size of Government
Meltzer, A. H., & Richard, S. F. (1981) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/261013 · Cited by 5,485
Cited by
Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India
Chattopadhyay, R., & Duflo, E. (2004) · Econometrica · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2004.00539.x · Cited by 2,284
Lizzeri, A., & Persico, N. (2004) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/0033553041382175 · Cited by 757
Political institutions and policy choices: evidence from the United States
Besley, T. (2002) · Working Paper Series · doi:10.1920/wp.ifs.2002.0213 · Cited by 577
Why Have Women Become Left-Wing? The Political Gender Gap and the Decline in Marriage
Edlund, L., & Pande, R. (2002) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355302760193922 · Cited by 454
Clots-Figueras, I. (2011) · Journal of Public Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.11.017 · Cited by 436
Metadata
- Authors
- Lott, Jr., & Kenny, L. W.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1999-12
- Volume
- 107
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1163-1198
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W2157916696
- Cited by
- 529
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 16.37
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Lott, Jr., & Kenny, L. W. (1999). Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government? Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/250093
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.