Mafia Wears Out Women in Power: Evidence from Italian Municipalities

Organized crime targets politicians with discretionary power over public resources, increasing the perceived risk of a political career and lowering its expected payoff. Since experimental evidence shows that women are more risk averse than men, organized crime infiltration should prove more effective in discouraging highly qualified women to take part in politics compared to men with the same level of power. The difference-in-differences estimates, which exploit the municipal government dissolution for mafia infiltration as an exogenous shock to the involvement of organized crime in local politics, reveal that organized crime has a stronger negative effect on the quality of female politicians compared to men. However, our results are compatible with alternative mechanisms such as organized crime influence on voters’ culture and on parties’ recruitment policies. Since our analysis is not conclusive, further research is needed to clearly identify the most likely driver of our results.