Do natural disasters systematically disadvantage female politicians? While extensive research examines how disasters affect incumbent accountability, it treats politicians as an undifferentiated category, ignoring heterogeneous effects by gender. I address this gap by providing the first systematic evidence that natural disasters create substantial and persistent electoral penalties for female candidates in a context of institutionalized gender equality and strong party competition.
I construct a novel candidate-level panel of Chilean municipal elections spanning 2004-2021, encompassing over 11,000 candidates across 347 communes. I merge official electoral records with newly compiled seismic intensity measures from the USGS and tsunami exposure data from Chile's disaster preparedness platform, enabling precise identification of disaster impact from the 2010 Maule natural disaster, The earthquake's unpredictability rules out anticipatory candidate positioning, and Chile's open-list proportional representation system allows me to examine within-coalition gender dynamics, isolating voter preferences from party strategies. Using triple diff-in-diff, I exploit variation across communes, time, and candidate gender to identify causal effects.
I find that female candidates in high-exposure communes experienced an 7-pp decline in within-vote share relative to male candidates—a 34% reduction from baseline. Pre-earthquake trends are parallel, and the penalty persists across all three post-earthquake elections (2012, 2016, 2021). The effect operates within party lists, showing voters reallocated support from female to male co-partisans with identical policy platforms.
Three mechanism tests help me disentangle the nature of the female penalty. First, effects concentrate among challenger women rather than incumbents, ruling out retrospective punishment for disaster response. Second, women continued running at increasing rates post-earthquake, indicating demand-side rather than supply-side mechanisms. Third, I examine an exogenous shock to copper prices and find no electoral benefits for female candidates in benefited communes. This asymmetry—negative shocks penalize women while positive shocks provide no advantage—is inconsistent with performance-based accountability but aligns with stereotype activation that disadvantages women during crises framed as requiring masculine leadership. Overall, the results show that disasters not only reshape political accountability but also reinforce gender stereotypes about leadership, suggesting that climate shocks can widen gender inequalities in political representation.
