Untangling Women’s Leadership in Subnational Governments: An Original Study of Argentina’s Provincial Cabinet Appointments between 1992 and 2016

What explains women’s inclusion in sub-national cabinet positions? While so far much of the gender and politics literature has examined women’s appointments to national ministerial cabinet, scholars have not considered women’s access to provincial level cabinets. To address this gap in the literature we focus on the evolution of women´s representation in provincial cabinets in Argentina. We take a supply and demand approach to assess how both factors unique to subnational governments and those features that are generalizable to national governments structure women’s pathways to power. Using an original time series dataset from 1992-2016 across all 24 subnational jurisdictions (23 provinces and the Autonomous District of Buenos Aires) we find that the likelihood that women are appointed to cabinet positions increases when cabinets are larger, and when the degree of economic and social development is higher. Moving beyond economic development and socio-demographic factors we further find that a number of institutional variables—such as the number of years since quota law adoption, sex of governor and deputy governor, and women’s numeric representation in legislatures—influence women’s appointments to cabinet posts. In particular, unlike national governments where women’s presence in legislatures predicts a positive effect of women’s appointments to ministries, in the Argentine provinces, we find that more women in legislatures decreases the likelihood that women will be appointed to the provincial cabinet. After explaining women’s access to cabinets more generally we build a model to explain how these political, economic, and institutional factors explain variation in the type of appointment women receive in ministerial cabinets.