Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339380 
Year of Publication: 
2026
Series/Report no.: 
ECONtribute Discussion Paper No. 396
Publisher: 
University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Reinhard Selten Institute (RSI), Bonn and Cologne
Abstract: 
Over the past century, women have gained formal political rights, yet remain under-represented in leadership-partly due to lower demand for representation among women themselves. In this paper, we shift the perspective from why men extended political rights to women toward what shaped women's own demand for representation. Specifically, we study how male absence during World War I affected German women's demand for the franchise, exploiting exogenous variation in drafting intensity across regions for identification. To make demand for political representation directly measurable, we construct a newly digitised panel dataset of the universe of German suffragette clubs - a revealed-preference measure of demand, given the considerable costs of maintaining a club, especially under wartime restrictions on political activism. Our results show that women were more likely to keep suffragette clubs open in counties with greater male absence. This effect is driven by regions where women publicly led war relief efforts, pointing to agency and specifically women's experience in visible leadership roles as the central mechanism. We further show that this demand for representation persisted after the franchise was extended, with women more likely to run for parliament and to vote in counties with greater wartime male absence and a suffragette club.
Subjects: 
Women's political representation
suffrage movement
agency
JEL: 
D71
J16
N44
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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