Women are underrepresented in politics. In this paper, we test one of the potential explanations for this situation: gender biases from voters. We use a natural experiment during French local elections in 2015: for the first time in this country, candidates had to run in pairs, that had to be gender-balanced. We argue that this reform confused some voters, who might have assumed that the first name on the ballot represented the “main” candidate. Since the order of the candidates on the ballot was determined by their alphabetical order, the order of appearance of male and female candidates was as-good-as-random, and this setting allows us to isolate gender biases from selection effects. Our main result is that there exists a negative gender bias affecting right-wing candidates, whose vote shares were lower by 1.5 percentage points when the female candidate appeared first on the ballot. The missing votes prevented some pairs of candidates from proceeding to the second round of voting. Using data on newspaper circulation and additional institutional features of the election - namely the fact that candidates can (but do not have to) report additional information about themselves on the ballot - we show that higher levels of information decrease discrimination. We argue that the discrimination we identify is, therefore, likely to be statistical.

中文翻译：

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性别偏见：来自法国地方选举自然实验的证据

妇女在政治中的代表性不足。在本文中，我们测试了对这种情况的一种可能解释：来自选民的性别偏见。我们在 2015 年法国地方选举期间使用了一个自然实验：在这个国家，候选人第一次必须成对竞选，而且必须是性别平衡的。我们认为，这项改革让一些选民感到困惑，他们可能认为选票上的名字代表“主要”候选人。由于候选人在选票上的顺序是由他们的字母顺序决定的，因此男性和女性候选人的出场顺序几乎是随机的，这种设置使我们能够将性别偏见与选择效应隔离开来。我们的主要结果是，右翼候选人存在负面的性别偏见，其投票份额低 1。当女性候选人首先出现在选票上时，增加了 5 个百分点。丢失的选票使一些候选人无法进入第二轮投票。使用有关报纸发行量和选举的其他制度特征的数据——即候选人可以（但不必）在选票上报告有关自己的其他信息——我们表明，更高水平的信息会减少歧视。因此，我们认为我们识别的歧视很可能是统计上的。使用有关报纸发行量和选举的其他制度特征的数据——即候选人可以（但不必）在选票上报告有关自己的其他信息——我们表明，更高水平的信息会减少歧视。因此，我们认为我们识别的歧视很可能是统计上的。使用有关报纸发行量和选举的其他制度特征的数据——即候选人可以（但不必）在选票上报告有关自己的其他信息——我们表明，更高水平的信息会减少歧视。因此，我们认为我们识别的歧视很可能是统计上的。