The Gender Gap and the Welfare State
07 March 2022, 6:15 pm–7:30 pm

Join us on 7 March for a keynote lecture with Dr. Dawn Teele (Johns Hopkins University) on the consequences of women's suffrage for electoral politics.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Julia Kreienkamp
Location
-
South Wing 9 Garwood Lecture TheatreSouth WingGower StreetLondonWC1E 6BT
Please note that this is a face-to-face event with limited ticket availability. If you have booked a ticket but find you are unable to attend we would be grateful if you could cancel the ticket to give others a chance to join us.
What, if anything, happened after women got the right to vote? Most social scientists agree women won the vote stemmed thanks to strategic actions taken by women's movements, and that politicians' perceptions about how women would vote played a key role in reform. Yet the consequences of women's suffrage for electoral politics remain highly debated. Did they merely double the electorate in each constituency that supported each party, or did they vote differently than men? Did men, fearing women's votes would overwhelm them, respond to women's suffrage by mobilizing and retaliating? Scholarship from the United States finds that men and women tended to vote similarly, although women turned out at lower levels. What is curious about the lackluster conclusions in the US is that, at a higher level of relief, in both the US and Europe economists have found large fiscal effects emerging from suffrage reform. Scholarship on the welfare state has revealed changes in budgetary line items, including increases in health and sanitation expenditures, and enhanced social programming, and rising tariff rates, post suffrage. Set against the post mortem issued by political scientists who have studied the gender vote gap, the political economy effects of women’s enfranchisement cry out for explanation. In this spirit, this book searches for a political mechanism that links women’s suffrage to welfare state expansion and policy reform.
About the Speaker
Dawn Teele
Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University

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