Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics at the heels of a close relative or spouse. We provide a theoretical explanation for this dynastic bias in gender representation that integrates political selection with informational inequalities across...

There is a scarcity of women and minorities at the apex of political power. This paper formalizes the concept of the glass ceiling for political organizations and builds on previous research to suggest four testable criteria. A glass ceiling exists if women and/or racial minorities (1) are...

Efforts to increase female political representation are often thought to be at odds with meritocracy. This paper develops a theoretical framework and an empirical analysis to examine this idea. We show how the survival concerns of a mediocre male party leadership can create incentives for gender...

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the impacts of these reforms on women's political leadership remain largely unknown. We exploit a quasi-experiment - a zipper quota imposed by the Swedish Social Democratic national party on municipal party groups - to examine quotas'...

A large literature has studied the context that affects women's numerical representation, but few have moved beyond numbers to study the drivers of a gender gap in political influence among elected politicians. Using panel data for the careers of 35.000 Swedish municipal politicians over six...

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capital, selecting on...