Riding the Second Wave: Can Radical Movements Increase Descriptive Representation?

Women have been underrepresented in political office officially since the first wave of feminists paved the way for women's suffrage a century ago. Existing work on increases in representation emphasizes institutional factors such as quotas, party nominations, and role models. I consider an understudied potential cause: radical social movements. Such movements may enhance women’s political representation by shaping public and elite attitudes through sympathetic media coverage, yet their confrontational tactics may also provoke backlash rooted in status-preservation motives. I study this dynamic through the Danish Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s-80s - a radical but nonviolent, feminist organization focused on improving women’s roles in households, labour markets, and politics. Using computer vision (OCR) to digitize records of all candidates who ever ran for office (1945-2022) and newspaper archives, I exploit the staggered establishment of women’s houses across Danish cities as local shocks to feminist mobilization. Employing a difference-in-differences design, I estimate the causal impact of these mobilizations on the supply and demand of women candidates and elected officials within cities over time. Further down the line, I look at whether the increased representation is due to first-time runners entering parliament or incumbents. Finally, I explore if there is a change in substantial representation of feminist topics in parliament, analysing parliamentary speeches (1966-2022) before and after the increase in representation. Preliminary findings show an increase in the supply of women candidates in the treated cities, but do not find any difference in the demand for women candidates. The paper shed light on the potential of radical movements to promote representation of women as well as causes to increases in representation and mobilization more broadly.