Nominations across gender: An empirical investigation of Brazilian municipal elections

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Economics from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

This work project studies the variation in female candidates for Brazilian city council elections. Using cross-sectional data for two election years, the impact of cultural, socio-economic and political variables is measured, followed by a calculation of the optimal values of the variable under study according to three interests: parties’ electoral results, male candidates’ electoral results and female candidates’ electoral results. We find that, though the first set of variables is significant, it explains only a small part, but average values of female candidates on parties’ lists are apparently converging to male’s optimum, suggesting that incumbents interests are dominating nominations.