Relatore: prof.ssa Anna Laura Baraldi - Dipartimento di Economia, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”

Abstract

This paper provides new and unexplored evidence of a negative link between an increasing female participation in politics and the infiltration of organized crime in government. We perform an empirical analysis over about 1700 Southern Italian municipalities between 1985 and 2013 exploiting two Italian laws: law no. 164/1991 that allows to measure mafia infiltration in the Italian municipalities and law no. 81/1993 that creates an exogenous source of variation in the share of women in the council that allows to correct for endogeneity bias. Increasing the female proportion in city council of 10 p.p. reduces the probability of dissolution for mafia infiltration of about 1.8 percentage points; the result is confirmed when considering an increase in female Mayors. This negative effect remains across several robustness checks. This research adds a further reason in favour of the reduction of the gender gap in politics. In fact, policies aimed at legitimizing democracy, such as gender quotas in the electoral law, also have the indirect effect of strengthening institutions in the fight against organized crime, which is always a key government agenda.  (Anna Laura Baraldi - Department of Economics, University of Campania L. Vanvitelli; Carla Ronza - Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Naples Federico II)