Gender penalty and electoral outcomes in the 2018 Italian elections

The number of women in the Italian parliament has steadily increased in recent decades, leading to a share of about 36 per cent of female legislators in the Chamber of Deputies in the 18th legislature. However, this result, while attesting to an improvement in the gender balance in the Italian parliament, does not really reflect the considerable increase in the share of female candidates that took place in the run-up to the 2018 elec- tion thanks to the newly introduced quota rule. Accordingly, male and female candidates in national elections seem to have different electoral outcomes. In this article, we empirically investigate gender penalty, understood as a negative effect exerted by gender on female candidates’ chances of winning seats in Parliament. By studying the electoral performance of candidates in the plurality arena at the 2018 elections, we are able to test the presence of differences in the candidates’ chances of being elected; in the share of personalized votes, and in the safeness/competitiveness of sin- gle-member districts, while controlling for a number of candidates’ other characteristics.