Associate Professor of Political Science Didac Queralt has an article in the Journal of Politics entitled “Historical Family Types and Female Political Representation: Persistence and Change.”
Abstract:
We argue that historical family configurations have left an enduring imprint on the gendered division of labor within the household, gender norms, and female political representation. We draw evidence from geographic variation in historical family types in Spain and municipality-level electoral data from 1978 to 2015 and earlier democratic spells. We find that areas where the stem family used to be prevalent—meaning that multiple generations of women lived together and shared domestic work—show higher female political representation today than areas with nuclear family tradition. Nevertheless, history is not destiny, and the impact of historical legacies can fade. In our mechanisms analyses, we demonstrate that the introduction of party-list gender quotas in the late 1980s equalized women’s political representation across regions with different historical family types, but it did not erase underlying differences in gender attitudes and female paid employment. Our research contributes to the study of historical persistence by assessing what institutions can and cannot do to combat patriarchal prejudice.