Research

Does electing a female political leader fuel a far-right backlash? Using a regression discontinuity design on close mixed-gender mayoral races in Italian municipalities, we find that electing a female mayor raises the vote share of Lega - Italy's main populist radical right party - by 2.0 percentage points at the next general election, nearly doubling the average change. To investigate the mechanisms, we construct novel municipal-level indices of masculinity norms and gender norms, and show that the reaction is concentrated where dominance-oriented masculinity norms are stronger and is further amplified by local economic insecurity, while exhibiting no clear gradient along gender norms. This pattern is consistent with a status-threat mechanism. The results provide causal evidence that advances in women's political leadership generate a far-right electoral backlash, and identify dominance-oriented masculinity - rather than gender norms per se - as the cultural margin along which it operates.

This paper estimates the causal effect of easing access to divorce on domestic violence. We study two legislative reforms in Italy that sharply cut the monetary costs and mandatory waiting periods for divorce, triggering a large and heterogeneous rise in divorce rates nationwide. We combine administrative data on the universe of divorces with a novel dataset on femicides, and we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in municipalities’ exposure to the reforms, arising from municipalities’ age composition interacted with national age-specific divorce rates. We find that easier access to divorce increases the probability of femicide, an effect primarily driven by domestic cases. We also find a reduction in measures typically associated with non-lethal domestic violence, indicating that lethal and non-lethal violence need not respond in the same way to an improvement in women’s outside options.