Substantive Representation of Mayors across Europe: Does Gender Matter?

The existence of a gender gap in political elites is a well-documented phenomena, widely scrutinized at national and regional levels. Indeed, there is a large body of research on women’s political representation, also at the local level –councillors-. However women mayors are still a scarce object of study in Europe, and scholars of local government and gender often highlight the lack of literature on the subject. Local politics is a fertile bed test for large N analysis of elected politicians, however, data are scarce and the limited literature that does focus on women in local government has frequently relied upon assumptions and rules of thumb, not well empirically grounded. Our rich dataset, based on a unique survey made to 2691 Mayors of municipalities above 10.000 inhabitants across 29 European countries -European Mayor 2nd Round-, allows us to test the gender differences while controlling by institutional constraints at the local level. In this paper we test the differences among men and women when they are at mayoralty in a variety of subjects, ranging from values, priorities, tasks and personal traits. We are facing the classical questions that had been, at least in the European continent, underdeveloped for women at mayoralty. In a nutshell, do women’s perceptions and role behaviour also differ from men’s at mayoralty? If yes, which variables account for these differences? Our results support, for European mayors, most of the conclusions on the significance of gender in substantive representation, with some particularities and nuances.