Marli Guimarães Fernandes

Do female and male candidates differ in their political campaigns? And why do they differ? Using individual political platforms from legislative elections in France, I combine computational text analysis with a regression discontinuity design setup in the two-round French legislative elections to understand political campaign differences between women and men. I find that women give more salience to topics such as security and foreign policy than males. This result is stronger in places where there is more substantial voter gender bias: in districts that have never elected a woman or where the gender wage gap is higher. I causally show that when women run against men, as opposed to running against a woman, they strategically give more prevalence to male-stereotypical topics. However, once elected, women provide more coverage to female stereotyped issues, health and education compared to male colleagues. In contrast, when male politicians run against women, they adapt their platforms more marginally.

School closures and consolidations have been advocated in several OECD countries. This paper analyses the impact of school closures on far-right voting patterns in France between 1995 and 2022. Using a matched difference-in-differences design, we demonstrate that the closure of the only school in a municipality leads to an increase of 0.597 percentage points in votes for the right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) party. This initial effect grows in the following three elections, ultimately reaching 1.490 percentage points. We provide indicative evidence that the increase in the RN vote is more pronounced in areas with a higher proportion of children in the population. In municipalities with multiple schools at the time of closure, this effect is absent, suggesting that citizens are particularly concerned with access to public education.