What women want: Su¤rage, female voter preferences and the scope of government*

How women su¤rage a¤ected the size of government is poorly understood. While aggregate data suggest that US states with su¤rage had higher expenditures than the ones without, individual data from elections describe women as more conservative during that period. This paper uses of a unique data set of issue votes to fully describe voter preferences and to directly estimate policy e¤ects. With surveys on all 195 federal votes held in Switzerland between 1981 and 2003, we …nd evidence for gender gaps in multiple dimensions. Secondly, we analyze support for costly projects. Consistent with the gender gaps in preferences, women approve higher expenses in certain areas, but oppose them in others. Overall, we …nd larger gender di¤erences regarding the scope than the size of government. Di¤erence-in-Di¤erences estimations for the aggregate su¤rage e¤ects support the view that scope mattered more than size in the last 50 years. JEL: H10, H50, J16, K00. *Correspondence: Patricia Funk, Stockholm Institute for Transition Economics (SITE), Stockholm School of Economics, Email: [email protected]; Christina Gathmann, Department of Economics and Stanford Center for International Development, Stanford University, Email: [email protected]. We thank Renee Adams, Ulf Axelson, Erik Bergloef, Tore Ellingsen, Daniel Ferreira, Mariassunta Gianetti, Henning Hillmann, Helena Svaleryd and various seminar participants of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, the Stockholm School of Economics, and the University of Uppsala for useful comments and suggestions. We are grateful to Werner Seitz, Magdalena Schneider and Elisabeth Willen from the Swiss Bureau of Statistics, Andreas Ladner, Klaus Armingeon, Hans Hirter and Christian Bolliger from the University of Bern and Francois Loretan from SIDOS for invaluable help in collecting the data. All remaining errors are our own.