Financial incentives are increasingly used to promote gender equality in political representation as part of broader gender-quota strategies. Such approaches rest on the idea that material gain can help counteract entrenched patriarchal values and exclusionary networks. While quota design and enforcement have received substantial scholarly attention, far less is known about how resource disparities condition responses to state-led equality reforms. This paper examines how these mechanisms operate in local contexts—where socioeconomic resources and party incentives vary widely. Thus, the local contexts offers an opportunity to better identify how economic conditions mediate the effectiveness of gender-equality initiatives. Wealthier localities may be less reliant on government financing, whereas economically weaker areas may depend more heavily on financial support. Understanding how material conditions intersect with institutional design is therefore crucial to explaining uneven patterns of reform adoption.
The study focuses on Israel’s 2014 municipal gender-quota reform, which offered additional campaign funding to parties whose elected representatives included at least 30 percent women. The policy’s incentive-based design, relying on voluntary uptake rather than legal compulsion, provides a unique opportunity to analyze how material and institutional factors interact in shaping reform outcomes. Using a comparative before-and-after design across four election cycles (2008–2024), the analysis draws on a new dataset combining municipal-level socioeconomic indicators with party-level electoral data. Because the policy applied only to certain municipalities, it enables both temporal and cross-sectional comparisons of treatment effects.
Preliminary findings indicate that the reform was most effective in middle- and high-income municipalities, where financial incentives complemented existing organizational and social capacities. In contrast, low-income municipalities showed minimal change in women’s representation, suggesting that financial incentives alone may be insufficient to alter entrenched power structures or social networks, even in resource-scarce environments.
By linking economic capacity to institutional uptake, the paper advances a more nuanced understanding of how structural inequalities shape the realization of gender-equality goals. The findings contribute to broader debates on distributive justice, institutional design, and the conditional effectiveness of gender-policy instruments in local democratic contexts.
