Zohal Hessami

Getting More Women Elected

Women remain underrepresented in politics and it is unclear how this might change. In a paper published by the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Zohal Hessami (joint with T. Baskaran) has investigated whether female council candidates receive more preferential votes when a female mayor has been recently elected into office. The researchers hand-collected data for 109,017 candidates in four open-list local council elections (2001–16) in all 426 municipalities of a German state. Based on RDD estimations for close mixed-gender races, they showed that female council candidates advance more from their initial list rank when the mayor is female. This effect spreads to neighboring municipalities and leads to a rising share of female council members.

Ms. Hessami’s research focuses on applied empirical research on Political Economy and Public Economics covering a broad range of policy-relevant topics such as political business cycles in local public finances, determinants of individual voting behavior, globalization and public policy as well as political selection and policy choices. She is an elected member of the Executive Board of the European Public Choice Society and is an editorial board member of the European Journal of Political Economy. She has published her research in various international peer-reviewed journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

During her visit to CESifo, Ms Hessami will be revising/extending a current paper on the effects of political selection on policy choices, analyzing whether the worldwide rise in female representation over the last two decades has substantive consequences for policy choices using the example of child care -- a public good arguably valued by women – and employing hand-collected micro-data for roughly 220,000 candidates running in local council elections in 2002, 2008 and 2014 in more than 1600 municipalities in Bavaria. In this setting of open-list elections, RDD regressions are run that are centered around mixed-gender races for the last council seat that accrues to a party. One finding is that a female victory in a mixed-gender race accelerates the expansion of public child care provision considerably. 

Zohal Hessami is an assistant professor for Political Economy at the University of Konstanz. Since February 2019 she has been on leave and holds a fixed-term professorship for Applied Political Economy at the University of Mannheim. She attended Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona in 2014 and the University of Cambridge in 2013 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim in 2012. She pursued her undergraduate studies at Maastricht University and Université de Montréal until July 2006. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Konstanz in 2011.