Follow the Money: Gender,Incumbency,and Campaign Funding in Chile

Abstract

We examine women’s access to campaign resources using data from all 960 candidates competing in Chile’s 2017 legislative elections. Even when controlling for district characteristics, women candidates receive less money in party transfers, bank loans, and donations; place fewer personal funds in their campaigns; and have fewer resources overall. However, previous experience and incumbency narrow the gap. When women are newcomers, gender serves as an important cue about candidate quality and funders default to favoring men. Our results lend credence to practitioners’ claims that money disadvantages women candidates in democracies, but focuses attention on the disadvantage faced by women newcomers. Moreover, this gender gap in campaign funding exists despite a gendered electoral financing scheme designed to make political actors more likely to invest in women’s campaigns. While increasingly popular among development experts, our research suggests such schemes might be insufficient for equalizing campaign funding between men and women.

Keywords

Chile campaigns fundraising gender women quotas incumbency

Introduction

Women face an uneven playing field when competing for elected office. Nearly 80 countries have adopted statutory mechanisms designed to increase the proportion of women in office, namely gender quotas for women candidates and reserved seats for women lawmakers (Hughes et al., 2019). Yet in 2021, men still comprise 75% of the world’s parliamentarians. The default politician in most countries remains a man, which means that women—unlike men—must prove they “have what it takes.” Said another way, gender remains an oft-used cue for determining who makes a good candidate, and the formal and informal structures shaping candidate emergence and success favor men (Bjarnegård, 2013; Kenny, 2013). Political parties both create and reinforce these structures: party leaders doubt women’s ambition and their ability to win (Coffé & Davidson Schmich, 2020; Josefsson, 2020); they concentrate women in unwinnable seats (Achin et al., 2020); and they reward men candidates with more radio and television time (Wylie, 2018).

Money also shapes candidates’ entry and success in gendered ways (Scarrow, 2007; Muriaas et al., 2020). Relative to men, women may lack the money needed to launch and run campaigns given women’s reduced access to capital, exclusion from traditional political networks, and gender bias from party leaders and outside donors. International organizations such as UN Women, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and the National Democratic Institute increasingly encourage governments to consider what Muriaas et al. (2020) call “gendered electoral financing schemes.” Financing measures have included establishing state funds to reward parties that elect women, as in Ireland and South Korea, or discounting filing fees for women candidates, as in Ghana. Such schemes have been implemented in dozens of Global North and Global South countries (Ballington & Kahane, 2014), often alongside reforms that strengthened gender quota laws, as legislators sought additional mechanisms to address women’s political underrepresentation (Feo & Piccio, 2019; Hinojosa & Vázquez Correa, 2018; Wang et al., 2020).

Despite this growing attention to gender gaps in campaign funding, academic research on cases outside the United States is relatively sparse. The Global South is frequently targeted by those urging gender-sensitive campaign finance reforms, but we know little about how women’s resource disadvantage actually works. We contribute to this emerging body of comparative research (see Muriaas et al., 2020) by documenting gender inequality in women’s campaign funding in Chile.

Chile adopted a gendered electoral financing scheme—aimed at providing women with more campaign funds—when it overhauled its election and campaign finance systems via multiple reforms between 2015 and 2016. Candidates in Chile raise money from parties, who transfer funds to candidates; from banks, who extend lines of credit; from private donors; and from their own coffers. Portions of candidates’ expenditures are later reimbursed by the state. The electoral reforms—which also included a 40% gender quota for women candidates—included provisions that reward parties with additional state monies for every woman elected and that use state monies to reimburse women at higher rates than men. By making the payoffs from investing in women’s campaigns more attractive, the electoral reforms aimed to improve women’s ability to raise funds from parties, banks, donors, and themselves.

We use mixed methods to analyze men’s and women’s campaign funding under the new electoral rules. First, we draw from 36 in-depth interviews to support the proposition that Chilean women—like their counterparts elsewhere—lack access to campaign resources relative to men. Party leaders, elected officials, and former candidates all highlighted women’s unequal access to campaign funds from parties, banks, donors, and their own resources, linking this unequal access to women’s persistent exclusion from male-dominated party networks and an overall bias in favor of men candidates. Second and most centrally, we test these claims using an original dataset that captures the campaign funding of all 960 lower house candidates competing in the 2017 elections. The 2017 elections marked the first time Chile made campaign finance data publicly available. Our dataset combines the amount of money candidates raised from each funding source with additional information about candidates, including sex, incumbency, prior candidacy and officeholding experience, party ideology, vote share, and relevant characteristics of their districts.

We find that women remain disadvantaged in accessing campaign finance, even when controlling for factors such as district competitiveness. Women running in 2017 received less money in party transfers, secured less money in bank loans, obtained fewer donations, and contributed fewer personal funds to their campaigns. Even with the gender quota and financing incentives in place, gender still serves as a heuristic for who makes a “good” candidate. Importantly, political experience reduces this tendency. In the absence of information about candidates’ past wins—when both men and women lack political experience—the funding gap favors men, signaling that female electoral newcomers in particular face a highly unequal playing field. When candidates are previous winners of elected office, and especially when candidates are incumbents, the campaign funding gap in favor of men disappears or even reverses. The gender gap between non-incumbent women and non-incumbent men is statistically significant, but there is no statistically significant difference in the money raised by incumbent women compared to incumbent men.

Our results lend credence to practitioners’ claims that women candidates have less campaign funding than men, but suggest the disadvantage is most pronounced among candidates without political experience. For new candidates, gender serves as the most salient cue about their quality, and funders default to favoring men. Once women are proven winners, and especially once women are incumbents, gender becomes a less important heuristic. Yet given women’s historic exclusion from electoral politics, few women are incumbents and therefore few women are positioned to benefit from the experience cue. Consequently, our results indicate that gendered electoral financing schemes, despite their increasing global popularity, might be insufficient to level the electoral playing field given that women are more likely to be electoral newcomers. These results echo what our interviewees often stated, and what the broader gender and politics literature often finds (Paxton et al., 2020): that the preference for men over women remains despite changes to the formal rules. In Chile, attempts to alter parties’ and donors’ incentives to fund women candidates did not really level the electoral playing field.

Women’s Campaign Funding Disadvantage

Financial resources affect electability (Jacobson, 1980; Scarrow, 2007). Candidates know that money matters and women across the globe report that funding concerns influence their calculations about pursuing political careers (Ballington & Kahane, 2014). Early research, focused almost exclusively on the United States, found that women candidates believe that fundraising is harder for them than for men. Among state legislators, 62% of Democratic women and 44% of Republican women reported that women face gender bias when raising money (Carroll & Sanbonmatsu, 2013). Among state legislative candidates, women likewise worried about fundraising more than men, though the differences were not statistically significant (Jenkins, 2007). Political action committees (PACs) that fund women candidates emphasize the importance of early money, perhaps unintentionally reinforcing US women’s perceptions that they will face gender bias in fundraising (Jenkins, 2007).

Yet, the US-based research suggests that, women’s concerns notwithstanding, “women are simply not disadvantaged when compared to men” in fundraising (Hogan, 2007, p. 1102). These findings apply to races at the national (Burrell, 1985, 1996), state (Hogan, 2007), and municipal levels (Adams & Schreiber, 2011), when similarly situated candidates are compared. Women congressional candidates are as or more competitive than men in obtaining funding from a broader spectrum of donors (Burrell, 2014). For high-profile governor races, however, women’s disadvantage persists (Sanbonmatsu & Rogers, 2020).

These findings are not necessarily contradictory. If women are concerned about fundraising, they may exert more time and effort, and their greater commitment—rather than the absence of bias—may level the playing field. Indeed, women candidates for US state legislative seats raised as much as men, but had to “work more aggressively to do so, by employing multiple methods and targeting multiple sources” (Jenkins, 2007, p. 234). Relatedly, women obtain a larger share of funds from many smaller donors relative to men (Crespin & Deitz, 2010), which may indicate more time spent on fundraising (Sanbonmatsu & Rogers, 2020). Additionally, US women are more likely than men to rely on donor groups, such as EMILY’s List. Women candidates who receive funds through donor networks raise more than men and more than women not using donor networks (Crespin & Deitz, 2010).

Ideology also matters. Democratic groups support women candidates more than Republican groups (Crowder-Meyer & Cooperman, 2018; Kreitzer & Osborn, 2019). Among Democrats, women donate more to women and men donate more to men; among Republicans, there are no differences in donor support for women versus men (Thomsen & Swers, 2017). Democratic women donors especially increase their generosity to women candidates and women-friendly PACs when women’s rights are salient during elections, again underscoring how progressive ideology increases women’s fundraising (Heerwig & Gordon, 2018).

Limited work exists on whether and how these patterns translate outside the US, where many countries impose stricter regulations on fundraising and parties play larger roles in funding campaigns. In Latin America and elsewhere, laws limit or prohibit private donations and candidates receive public money, which is transferred to parties who then allocate resources among candidates (Casas-Zamora & Zovatto, 2015). Many countries also regulate when campaigns start and end and how much candidates can appear in the media and in advertisements. In theory, more regulation levels the playing field between men and women: for instance, if no one can receive donations, women’s (presumed) donor disadvantage (presumably) disappears (Hinojosa, 2012).

Work from the Global South indicates that women candidates have significant resource disadvantages, including in Benin (Johnson, 2020), Cape Verde (Borges et al., 2020), Ghana (Bauer & Darkwah, 2020), Kenya (Bouka et al., 2019), Malawi (Kayuni & Muriaas, 2014), and Uganda (Schneider, 2019). In these cases, women aspirants and candidates report that lack of money means party leaders do not take them seriously and that, even when nominated, funding gaps hinder their ability to campaign competitively. Research from Latin America has uncovered similar patterns. Among Brazilian candidates who receive party and donor funds, women raise less money than men in state legislative races (Sacchet, 2018) and in federal races (Speck & Mancuso, 2014; Wylie, 2018). In Chile, women municipal candidates also spend less than men (Bo & Navia, 2016b), perhaps because they start with fewer resources.

Women may face difficulty fundraising because of biases against their participation in politics and their continued exclusion from the business and professional networks that typically fund political campaigns (Ballington & Kahane, 2014, p. 307). Comparative research concludes that women remain marginalized from elite political and party networks, even as their overall presence in parties and elected office increases (Bjarnegård, 2013; Franceschet & Piscopo, 2014; Kenny, 2013). However, some women candidates may accumulate sufficient political capital to mitigate this disadvantage. Research from Belgium shows that the money gap existed between men and women in the non-competitive positions, but disappeared between men and women in winnable positions (Smulders et al., 2019).

Donor groups have helped women raise money in the US (Crespin & Deitz, 2010; Crowder-Meyer & Cooperman, 2018) but are less common internationally, especially in the Global South. Instead, gendered electoral financing schemes are increasingly popular policy tools. Measures throughout Latin America and elsewhere require parties to spend money on initiatives that boost women’s leadership, such as women’s candidate training (Feo & Piccio, 2019; Hinojosa & Vázquez Correa, 2018). Schemes also fine parties for failing to fill statutory gender quotas, as in Ireland and France (Achin et al., 2020; Buckley & Gregory, 2020). Yet creating financial incentives for parties to nominate women neither increases women’s campaign resources nor lowers their campaign costs (Ohman, 2018). Even where gendered electoral financing schemes have pursued the latter—as with Ghana’s reduced filing fees for women candidates—researchers remain skeptical about their effectiveness (Bauer & Darkwah, 2020). More broadly, researchers doubt that such schemes can overcome party leaders’ bias against women (Feo & Piccio, 2020; Kayuni & Muriaas, 2014; Muriaas et al., 2020). The comparative research overall indicates that women outside the US continue to have fewer campaign resources relative to men, given gendered processes that shape who is—and is not—seen as a “good” candidate.

Designing a New Electoral System in Chile

Chile is a Global South democracy, holding free and fair elections since 1989, at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. Prior to the 2015-2016 reforms, Chile elected its congress using a two-member district formula known as the “binomial system.” A party could only win both seats if that party doubled the vote share of the second-highest polling party. In practice, this rule encouraged parties to coalesce into two large pacts—a center-left coalition and a right coalition—which then divided the spoils in each district, with each coalition usually (but not always) winning one seat. The binominal system generated political stability but sustained criticism for limiting political representation and concentrating power in a small group of party elites (Siavelis, 2016).

This system changed starting in 2015, when then-President Michelle Bachelet led sweeping electoral reforms. Most importantly, the binomial system was replaced with an open-list proportional representation system that awards seats to pacts via a first round D’Hondt calculation, and then apportions seats among the constituent sub-pacts in a second round D’Hondt calculation. Why and how the electoral reform happened lies outside the scope of this article (but see Arce Riffo, 2018; Gamboa & Morales, 2016). Important for our purposes is that the reforms reduced the number of chamber districts from 60 to 28 while expanding the Chamber of Deputies from 120 to 155 seats and increasing district magnitude to between 3 and 8. Overall, the reforms aimed to make Chile’s system more representative and responsive, increasing the diversity of parties competing for and winning seats.

The electoral reforms also introduced a gender quota, requiring that women comprise 40% of each party’s nominees, with no rank-order requirement due to the open-list system. In 2015, Chile was one of only three Latin American countries without a statutory gender quota (Funk et al., 2017), and Chile elected fewer women compared to its regional peers. By 2016, women averaged 27% in the region’s lower or unicameral legislatures, but comprised just 16% of Chile’s lower house (Funk et al., 2017). Chile placed in the bottom third of countries ranked by the proportion of women in national parliaments, while Bolivia, Mexico, and Costa Rica placed in the top ten (IPU, 2019). Women in Chile had pushed for gender quotas throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and success came with the electoral system redesign (Arce Riffo, 2018).

The 2015-2016 reforms included a new public-private campaign finance system. Chile does not hold universal primaries, and few parties hold internal primaries, so fundraising matters for the general election. Candidates need money for advertising, hiring staff, and organizing events, among other typical campaign expenditures. Under the new system, the state transfers money to parties, who then transfer money to candidates. Candidates also raise money from banks loans, from individual donors (but not corporations), and from their own coffers. “Money” includes cash and the cash value of in-kind donations, such as vehicle loans or volunteer hours. The new law limits how much candidates can raise and spend in each category, but ceilings vary by district according to the number of registered voters. In 2017, for instance, the spending cap ranged from US$650,928 for the eighth district of Metropolitan Santiago to US$88,048 in the 14th district of sparsely-populated Aysén. Candidates’ own contributions are limited to 25% of their district’s cap (SGFE, 2017). Overall, the campaign finance reforms constituted an approximately 50% cut relative to previous spending limits (Fuentes, 2017), but candidates largely do not reach their caps. As a benchmark, our data indicate that the most well-funded candidate in 2017 reported total cash-on-hand of US$225,394, while the median candidate reported US$4615.

The state also helps candidates obtain and spend money. First, the state provides parties and independent candidates with a cash advance (anticipo fiscal). Second, the state reimburses parties, party candidates, and independent candidates for certain campaign expenses (reembolso fiscal). For independent candidates, the reimbursement is based on the anticipo; for party candidates, the reimbursement is based on the number of votes received. Only expenses not covered by other funding streams are reimbursed, and only up to an established amount (SGFE, 2017).

The gendered electoral financing scheme was tied to the reembolso. Parties receive an additional reimbursement of 500 UF for every woman elected. A UF is a Chilean accounting unit where, in 2017, one UF equaled approximately US$40; so, parties would receive an additional US$20,000 per woman elected. Women candidates also receive a higher reembolso rate than men: women’s rate is .05 UF times the number of votes received (US$2 per vote), compared to men’s rate of .04 UF times the number of votes received (US$1.60 per vote). If the new mandatory 40% quota was a stick that compelled parties to nominate more women, then the gendered electoral financing scheme was a carrot. This reimbursement encouraged parties to tangibly support women candidates and aimed to decrease any financial risks associated with investing in women’s campaigns. The formal rule changes aimed to level campaign funding for women.

Theorizing Women’s Disadvantage in Campaign Funding

We conducted 36 interviews about Chile’s electoral reforms with women and men party leaders, former candidates, and elected legislators over four visits to Santiago, three before the November 2017 elections (July 2016, May 2017, and June-July 2017) and one after (January 2018). We selected interviewees who were party insiders or highly familiar with party practices, since we wanted to understand how political actors thought the new electoral rules would shape women’s campaigns and the election. Those interviewed before the elections did not know the outcomes, and those interviewed after were asked to reflect on their expectations and the outcomes. Interviewees repeatedly identified campaign finance as critical to the electoral reform. Echoing research from Ghana, Kenya, Brazil, and elsewhere (Bauer & Darkwah, 2020; Ballington & Kahane, 2014; Bouka et al., 2019; Wylie, 2018), interviewees routinely cited campaign costs as deterring women candidates in elections past and present. They nonetheless doubted that the gendered electoral finance scheme would change funders’ willingness to invest in women.

For instance, a political analyst commented that women candidates could not compete “under equal conditions if [women] have fewer resources” (Interview 2, Santiago, January 2018). Parties were identified as particularly responsible. A long-time Christian Democratic Party activist reported that the greatest difficulty faced by women was lack of economic support from parties (Interview 1, Santiago, July 2017). She noted that when she and other new women candidates met to strategize about their campaigns, they “received little help in economic terms and little help from the party” (Interview 1, Santiago, July 2017). Another interviewee agreed, but hoped the new rules would eliminate parties’ ability to claim they lacked the funds to support women. In her words, “campaigns are very expensive…so therefore you need real support” (Interview 6, Santiago, January 2018).

The gendered electoral financing measures aimed to encourage parties to support women, but interviewees remained skeptical. Echoing this sentiment, one candidate commented, “If a political commitment exists, it is more a commitment to comply with the quota than a political commitment”—meaning parties would fill the quota without changing which candidates they favored with financial support (Interview 1, Santiago, July 2017). For instance, a successful woman candidate recalled how men candidates in her party requested and received more money, even though the party previously pledged equal financial support to all candidates (Interview 7, Santiago, January 2018). In line with research highlighting women’s exclusion from elite political networks (Bjarnegård, 2013; Franceschet & Piscopo, 2014; Kenny, 2013), this interviewee explained how men felt entitled to ask party leaders for additional money. Men had personal relationships with other men, as they all went out drinking together or belonged to the same Masonic lodge (Interview 7, Santiago, January 2018).

Overall, our interviewees indicated that women have fewer campaign resources than men. As an electoral analyst told us, “In the end, we realized that in all types of support, women receive less” (Interview 2, Santiago, January 2018). We test these qualitative observations against the 2017 campaign funding data. Drawing on the literature and our interviews, we hypothesize that women’s funding disadvantage appears for each revenue stream available in Chile: party transfers, bank loans, donations, and candidates’ own resources.

First, parties may favor men over women. For example, a major Brazilian party nominated more than 20% women in 2010, but these women received only 1.7% of party transfers (Wylie, 2018, p. 112). Likewise, our Chilean respondents routinely mentioned parties’ greater willingness to fund men. Even well-known women struggled. For instance, a woman whose former career provided her extensive name recognition reported that she received little financial support from the party (Interview 4, Santiago, January 2018).

Hypothesis 1: Women will receive less money in party transfers than men.

Second, women’s exclusion from elite networks bodes poorly for their ability to access bank loans. Chilean politician Adriana Muñóz explained, “Men have access to circles or networks where money is lent—they are friends with bank managers. But we are not supported this way” (Franceschet, 2005, p. 89-90). Generally, women also have less wealth than men, due to job market discrimination and occupational segregation. Less wealth means less collateral. One high-profile woman politician noted that “women in Chile receive less credit than men because they are less likely to be the owners of capital” (Interview 9, Santiago, January 2018). The ability to sustain financial risk is also gendered, with women being less likely than men to gamble their families’ security. One well-known Chilean politician noted that women could not “risk their homes” to run for office (Interview 9, Santiago, January 2018).

Hypothesis 2: Women will receive less in bank loans than men.

Third, women may receive fewer campaign donations. Latin American women are less likely than men to belong to the informal organizations that mobilize voters and donations (Hinojosa, 2012). Women candidates are also less likely to come from professions that connect candidates with donors (Hinojosa, 2012; Wylie, 2018). For instance, Argentine women politicians are less likely to be lawyers and businesspersons and more likely to be teachers and activists (Franceschet & Piscopo, 2014). In Brazil, men raised 24.8% of their campaign money from corporate donors, while women raised 14.6% (Wylie, 2018, p. 50-51). In our interviews, a campaign manager referenced women’s marginalization from elite networks: “We didn’t know people who were willing to provide much in the way of donations” (Interview 10, Santiago, January 2018).

Hypothesis 3: Women will receive less in campaign donations than men.

Fourth, women may be more reluctant or less able to self-fund their campaigns. Women may be less willing to “take bread off the family table” (Wylie, 2018, p. 160), as women see money as helping their families, not advancing their careers (Hinojosa, 2012). They may also face greater censure for spending personal money on themselves, whereas men are expected to invest in their careers (Bouka et al., 2019). Women may not even control their family’s finances (Hinojosa, 2012; Bouka et al., 2019). Indeed, an interviewee flagged the challenges women faced with taking on debt and investing in their own campaigns, given family obligations (Interview 6, Santiago, January 2018).

Hypothesis 4: Women will contribute fewer personal resources to their campaigns than men.

Gender may also interact with candidates’ party and experience. Conventional wisdom holds that left parties are more women-friendly and more egalitarian in supporting women’s candidacies (Caul, 1999), though recent work on Latin America shows that left ideology cannot explain which parties nominate women (Funk et al., 2017; Wylie, 2018, p. 122). In Chile, prior to the introduction of gender quotas, left parties nominated more women—but right parties elected more women (Hinojosa, 2009; Bo & Navia, 2016a). While the effects of party ideology on women’s nomination and election remain ambiguous, there may be reason to expect a left advantage for fundraising. Left-leaning Chilean donors—like their counterparts in the US—may have greater normative commitments to women’s political participation than right-leaning donors and be more willing to support women. Women with progressive ideologies may feel less restricted by gender norms that prevent women from investing personal and family resources in campaigns.

Hypothesis 5: The gender gap in campaign funding will not appear between men and women candidates in left parties.

Lastly, candidates who are known may have a fundraising advantage over candidates who are unknown. In Latin America, party and electoral bias against women diminishes when women are incumbents (Martínez Ossa & Navia, 2017; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009; Shair-Rosenfield & Hinojosa, 2014; Speck & Mancuso, 2014). Incumbents have name recognition and are proven winners, making incumbency a strong and immediate cue about political experience. Candidates who are not incumbents, but who have past experience running for and holding elected office, may similarly be identified as “good” candidates. One party leader mentioned, for instance, that name recognition gave women who previously served as municipal councilors or mayors good odds of winning (Interview 11, Santiago, June 2017). Another interviewee highlighted the importance of candidates’ previous bids, since parties could trust these candidates to campaign well (Interview 12, Santiago, July 2017).

Conversely, non-incumbent and non-experienced women cannot rely on experience cues. Interviewees explained that first-time candidates faced a vicious cycle, where they needed more money to become known, but had more difficulty raising money because they were unknown (Interview 2, Santiago, January 2018). As one interviewee explained, “In access to credit, you could be a good candidate but perhaps [the candidates] are new and the banks don’t know them, perhaps they do not have as good of a possibility of success” (Interview 2, Santiago, January 2018).

Hypothesis 6: Past political experience, especially incumbency, will help women raise funds on par with men.

Campaign Funding Data

In Chile in 2017, 960 candidates competed for seats in the lower house across 28 new electoral districts. Candidates disclosed their campaign resources to Chile’s electoral agency SERVEL, known for its technical ability and legal compliance. Since 2017 marked the first time using the new electoral rules—including the new transparency and reporting rules—we cannot tell whether the new system narrowed or widened funding differences between women and men. However, we can tell whether differences existed in 2017 despite the gendered electoral financing scheme. We rely on SERVEL data as compiled and cleaned by skilled researchers working for Espacio Público (Public Space), a highly professional Chilean non-governmental organization.¹

Espacio Público reported candidates’ cash resources in the following categories: transfers received from parties, lines of credit borrowed from banks, candidates’ own resources, and donations from anonymous and non-anonymous sources. We say “cash” because Espacio Público did not include the monetary value of candidates’ in-kind donations, which also goes against their spending caps. Consequently, we cannot say whether and which candidates reached their caps, but we can analyze candidates’ cash-on-hand. Cash remains the most valuable resource because it is fungible. Our data also reflect candidates’ final tallies, not their line-item intake. For instance, if a candidate reported two million Chilean pesos in bank loans, we know neither the number of loans nor the individual loan amounts. Likewise, our data report the candidates’ total donations, not the amounts given by individual donors.

To ease interpretation, we converted all figures into US dollars, using the rate of 650 Chilean pesos to 1 USD. We combined anonymous and non-anonymous donations into one measure, which yields four sources of campaign funding: party transfers, bank loans, own resources, and donations. Correlations between these sources indicate that having more money in one category does not correspond with having more money in another: all correlations are below .37, with the exception that donations and own resources are highly correlated at .69 (Supplementary Appendix 1). We cannot observe the strategic decisions candidates make about pursuing different funding sources, but sufficient for our purposes is that the different sources largely do not move together.

Running campaigns in Chile costs significantly less than in the United States, as Table 1 shows. Here, we add a measure summarizing each candidates’ total money across categories. These are our five dependent variables. We report the mean and, given the preponderance of zeros, the median: 214 candidates (22%) ran with no money in any category, though none of the zero-dollar candidates were incumbents. Candidates may have raised zero dollars because they tried and failed, or because they failed to appreciate the competitive dynamics of the new electoral system. In interviews, party elites noted that many parties and candidates did not fully understand how the new system—alongside increased district magnitude—would raise inter- and intra-party and pact competition (Interview 11, June 2017, Santiago; Interview 12, July 2017, Santiago; Interview 13, July 2017, Santiago). Candidates may have underestimated how investing in their campaigns would help them win.

Table 1.

Summary Statistics for Measures of Campaign Funding.

	Mean	Standard Deviation	Median	Maximum
Party transfers	5288	8212	1538	56,887
Bank loans	2612	9862	0	91,927
Own resources	2671	7725	0	76,923
Donations	5888	13,888	153	126,163
Combined resources	16,459	28,409	4615	225,394

Note: Amounts in US dollars.

The Gender Gap in Campaign Funding

We begin with bivariate analyses to test our hypotheses related to gender, party ideology, and political experience. We coded for candidates’ sex based on candidates’ names, successfully identifying the sex of all 960 candidates for the Chamber of Deputies: 563 (58.6%) were men and 397 (41.4%) were women. Collectively, parties over-filled the 40% quota, but not by much. Twenty-six different political parties contested the 2017 elections, and we divided these parties into left, center, and right.² We coded ideology based on the candidate’s party rather than pact, because parties (not pacts) transfer money to candidates, and because the open-list system creates competition among candidates and among parties within pacts.

We used SERVEL data to code for candidates’ previous experience running for or holding elected office. Prior experience boosts candidates’ name recognition among parties, donors, and voters, sending an important cue about candidate quality. Information about previous runs and wins is available for all candidates and unlike other measures of candidate quality—such as famous surnames—requires no qualitative judgments that would introduce noise. Therefore, prior experience is both a valid and reliable proxy for who makes a “good” candidate. For all 960 candidates, we identified their participation and success in all elections held since 1989. These races included: deputy or senator since 1989, municipal councilors since 1992, mayors since 2004, and regional councilors in 2013.³

A Gender Gap Unaffected by Party Ideology

The descriptive statistics obscure significant gender gaps in the average resources reported. Rounding the numbers, women on average receive US$1800 less in party transfers; US$2200 less in bank loans; US$1700 less from their own coffers; US$4400 less in donations; and US$10,000 less overall. Since the gap is men>women in all cases, we use a one-tailed test for all difference of means, with the Welch statistic for unequal variance. The gaps were statistically significant at the 1% level for all five measures (Supplementary Appendix 1). We refer to this trend as the gender gap in campaign funding. Our data technically reveal sex differences, but our theory holds that gendered processes and norms explain why the gap between women and men exists. We therefore use “gender” when referring to findings that speak to our theory, and “sex” when referring to the variable itself.

The fact that many candidates run without any money urges caution when relying on differences of means alone, as too many zeroes distort the average. Of the 214 candidates that ran with no resources in any category, men and women were represented in proportions roughly equal to their presence in the dataset: 111 men (52%) and 103 women (48%). Looking by funding type, and consistent with the medians reported in Table 1, most candidates ran without bank loans (88%) and without drawing from their own coffers (67%). Fewer candidates ran without donations (44%) and without party transfers (40%). Higher proportions of women candidates than men candidates report having no cash in each category.

Given the preponderance of zeros, Table 2 reexamines the gender gap after dropping candidates with no money in that category. Looking at candidates with at least one USD widens the gender gap in all categories. Among candidates with money, men receive, on average, about US$2800 more from the party; about US$11,300 more in bank loans; about US$2400 more from their own coffers; and roughly US$5400 more in donations. Men have about US$11,500 more cash overall. These gaps are all statistically significant. Figure 1 demonstrates this point further, showing the distributions for candidates with at least one USD for party transfers, own money, donations, and combined resources (we dropped bank loans due to the small number of candidates reporting this resource).⁴ The distribution for women candidates is more skewed to the lower values of the x-axis than is the distribution for men candidates, showing that higher proportions of women have lower values of money in each category.

Table 2.

Average Resources for Men and Women Reporting any Money in That Category.

	Party Transfers^∗∗∗	Bank Loans^∗∗∗	Own Money^∗∗	Donations^∗∗∗	Combined Resources^∗∗∗
Men	9963 (324)	26,788 (74)	8839 (216)	12,451 (348)	25,734 (452)
Women	7133 (234)	15,434 (34)	6480 (101)	7024 (188)	14,180 (294)
All candidates	8814 (576)	23,214 (108)	8087 (317)	10,547 (536)	21,181 (746)

Note: Candidate counts are in parentheses. All amounts are in US dollars.

^∗∗∗p < .01; ^∗∗p < .05; ^∗p < .10 (one-tailed test with Welch statistic for unequal variance).

Figure 1.

Distribution of campaign resources by sex with normal density plots, for candidates reporting at least one US dollar.

Finally, the gender gap appears across parties, for all candidates and also when restricting the sample to candidates with at least one USD. Within left, center, and right parties, women remain under-resourced relative to men on all five measures, and these gaps are statistically significant at the 10%, 5%, or 1% level (Supplementary Appendix 1).⁵ These straightforward difference of means tests provide initial support for Hypotheses 1 through 4, namely that women will have fewer resources than men in all categories. Dividing the sample by party ideology does not support Hypothesis 5, which proposed that women in left parties received the same financial support as their male peers. Women appear disadvantaged no matter parties’ ideology.

Gender, Previous Experience, and Incumbency

We also examined the gender gaps conditional on previous experience. We begin by noting that few 2017 deputy candidates had sought or won elected office before. Forty-four percent (425) were first-time competitors, and of the 56% (535) who had run before, most had lost. Only 230 of the 960 candidates were previous winners, amounting to just 43% of the have-runs or 24% of all candidates. Most previous winners had won just one race, and most were men: 178 men compared to 52 women. The gender gap in running and winning—which was statistically significant for all race types except running for municipal councils—is not surprising, given women’s overall underrepresentation in electoral politics (Supplementary Appendix 2).⁶ Based on these trends, and building upon previous research finding no evidence that the number of deputies’ previous terms affected whether deputies sought or won reelection (Bunker & Navia, 2015), we treat running and winning as binary variables. We anticipate that incumbency will provide the strongest experience cue, but started with a broader analysis, placing candidates into three mutually exclusive groups based on past political experience: those who never ran for any elected office before (“never-rans”); those who ran but always lost (“perpetual losers”); and those who won any office at least once (“previous winners”).

We then categorized race types as follows: (1) national legislature (deputy and/or senator); (2) subnational offices (mayor, municipal councilor, and/or regional councilor); (3) mayor only; or (4) all offices combined.⁷ Across all race categories, the same pattern appears: previous winners raise significantly more money than never-rans and perpetual losers. By previous race type and campaign funding category, the differences between an average never-ran’s coffers and an average perpetual-loser’s coffers are small in absolute terms; not always statistically significant; and inconsistent in terms of whether perpetual losers raise more than never-rans or vice-versa. Winners always raise more, however (Supplementary Appendix 2). Consider the combined resources of candidates with at least one earlier congressional bid: the average never-ran raises US$10,638 and the average perpetual loser raises US$17,084, while the average previous winner raises US$57,989.

The more important question is whether men’s experience advantage in running and winning, and winners’ advantage in fundraising, combine to explain why women raise less funds than men. Here, we find a critical difference between never-rans, on the one hand, and perpetual losers and previous winners, on the other. On average, men never-rans always raise more money than women never-rans, no matter the type of race or funding source, and their advantage is nearly always statistically significant. However, for many race types and for many sources of campaign funding, the average differences between women and men perpetual losers and between women and men previous winners are negligible or women raise more, but the gender gaps are not always statistically significant (Supplementary Appendix 2). These results offer initial support for Hypothesis 6, that the gender gap in fundraising disappears among candidates with political experience.

Figure 2 shows this result for combined resources. Among inexperienced candidates, men have a statistically significant advantage over women: the gender gap is about US$5500 for candidates never having sought congressional office and about US$15,300 for candidates never having sought subnational office. But among experienced candidates—both perpetual losers and previous winners—the gender gaps are negligible. The one exception is women congressional winners, who out-fundraise men congressional winners by about US$15,000 on average. Yet this difference is not statistically significant, likely because very few women are previous congressional winners. Absent any signals about previous experience, gender cues quality and men raise more, but once candidates are winners, women catch up and may gain a slight advantage.

Figure 2.

Total campaign coffers for 2017 candidates, by previous experience and sex. Note. One-tailed test comparing men and women in each category of previous experience. *** p <.01.

Importantly, the categories of previous winners and incumbents overlap. Fifty-two women won office previously, 14 at the congressional level—and these 14 women account for all the female incumbents. For men, 178 won office previously, 90 at the congressional level, 69 of whom were incumbents. All told, 84 incumbents ran in 2017: 14 women and 70 men (69 winners in 2013 plus one appointed deputy). These 84 incumbents amount to just 9% of the 2017 candidates (12% of all men candidates and 4% of all women candidates), consistent with previous research showing considerable renewal among Chilean deputies each term (Bunker & Navia, 2015).

Focusing on incumbents most clearly demonstrates how political experience helps women close and even reverse the fundraising gap. Women incumbents had larger coffers than men incumbents: women incumbents receive about US$1300 more from their parties; place about US$2800 more in their campaigns; receive about US$6700 more in donations; and enjoy approximately US$9200 more overall. Only for bank loans does the gender gap still advantage men incumbents, with women receiving about US$1700 less than men. None of these differences are statistically significant (both one- and two-tailed tests), though again, the sample size is small (Supplementary Appendix 2).

Overall, the descriptive statistics and bivariate analyses show that women candidates have fewer campaign resources than men across all five measures, and that women are especially disadvantaged accessing the common sources of party transfers and donations. Party ideology does not alter this trend: left women are not advantaged in raising money, as men out-fundraise women across party ideology. Political experience, however, shifts the pattern among previous winners. Women never-rans remain disadvantaged, but women winners and women incumbents fundraise on par with—or possibly more than—men. The patterns provide suggestive evidence that winning counters funders’ tendency to use gender as a signal of candidate quality.

Modeling Candidates’ Access to Campaign Funds

To test the robustness of our main conclusions about gender, previous experience, and incumbency, we estimate a regression model that controls for a series of confounding variables at the individual and district level. We combined Espacio Público data, which provided name, party, pact, and our dependent variables, with SERVEL data, which provided the data on candidates’ previous experience, and added further measures.

First, certain candidates may be perceived as more viable than others, thus having a competitive edge in fundraising. How to proxy for competitive advantage? All candidates ran in new districts in 2017. The new districts combined with the open-list system created uncertainty about which candidates could or would win: votes would be pooled by pact and then by party, allowing candidates receiving many votes to “drag” low-performing pact members along to victory, with the dragged candidates leapfrogging over higher voter-getters. For instance, in District 9, a Communist party candidate dragged up a co-partisan that obtained 1.29% of the vote—fewer votes than 12 losing candidates in that district.

If non-viable candidates are those receiving 1% or less than the vote share of the worst winner (Wylie et al., 2019), then all candidates were viable in 2017. Using SERVEL data, we find that losing candidates received anywhere between 120 votes to 25,470 votes, and winning candidates received anywhere between 3095 votes to 103,337 votes. Across all districts, no candidate received zero votes, and the margin between the worst loser (the candidate who received the least votes and lost) and the worst winner (the candidate who received the least votes and won) ranged from 2975 votes in district 27 to 13,887 votes in district 2. The worst losers overall received between 2.5% and 25% of the vote share of their district’s worst winners. For this reason, we do not proxy competitive advantage as vote share—all candidates had some chance of winning, and all therefore had incentives to raise money. About 20% of candidates ultimately ran with no money, but the correlation coefficients between candidates’ vote share and money raised from parties, banks, own resources, and donations are all less than .5.⁸

We instead suggest that previous experience and incumbency are better proxies for competitive advantage and thus viability, especially given our interviewees’ emphasis on the importance of name recognition. The bivariate analysis reveals that previous winners and incumbents enjoy a fundraising advantage, with prior victories and incumbency reducing or even flipping the fundraising gap between men and women. Since the two measures operationalize similar ideas, we interact incumbency with sex because, theoretically, incumbency provides the clearest quality cue: incumbency signals that candidates have direct experience with the office they are currently seeking. Moreover, all women in our dataset who previously won congressional office are incumbents—there is no variance in these two groups of women. Nonetheless, the bivariate analysis did indicate the importance of winning any elected office, and we include a dummy variable for the 108 men and 38 women who were previous winners, but not incumbents (1 = previous winner; 0 = never-ran or perpetual loser).⁹

Second, in the models examining own resources and total coffers, we control for candidates’ marital status, which they declare when filing their candidacies (data from InfoProbidad).¹⁰ On the one hand, married candidates may have more resources to contribute to their campaigns. On the other hand, gendered norms that render women responsible for family welfare can restrict married women’s ability to fund their careers, relative to married men (Wylie, 2018). We measure marital status as a dummy variable (married/civil partnership = 1; single/divorced/widowed = 0).

Turning to the district level, tightly contested districts mean candidates need more money to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Parties, banks, donors, and even candidates themselves may raise more money in competitive districts. Yet as noted, 2017 offered candidates and parties a new electoral landscape, and not all players understood the implications. Previous legislative results reflected outcomes from a 2-seat-per-district system, in which two pacts comprising five to six parties competed in 60 districts. In 2017, nine pacts representing 26 parties competed in 28 districts with higher seat magnitudes.

Since we could not use prior election results to measure district competitiveness, we created a backwards-looking measure using the 2017 election results (SERVEL data). We follow Blais and Lago (2009), who argue that the best measure of district competitiveness in proportional representation systems is the minimum number of votes any party would have needed to change the election outcome. Said another way, this measure captures the minimum number of votes any party (in our case, any pact) would have needed to steal one seat away from another party (another pact), divided by district magnitude. The smaller the value, the more competitive the district.¹¹ While the newness of the electoral system meant that parties and candidates could not precisely calculate district swing, they likely tried to estimate how hotly contested the district would be, given district magnitude and perceived popularity of inter- and intra-pact competitors.¹² As an additional proxy for competition, we control for the number of candidates running per district. In the models predicting own resources, donations, and total resources, we control for district wealth. Candidates and donors in less wealthy districts are likely worse-off relative to candidates and donors in more wealthy districts, and under the binomial system, poor districts nominated fewer women (Martínez Ossa & Navia, 2017).

Lastly, we control for districts with higher levels of women’s political inclusion. First, we control for the total proportion of women municipal councilors in that district, based on the 2016 municipal election results from SERVEL.¹³ Second, we control for electoral districts in the country’s urban areas, meaning the 10 electoral districts corresponding to the capital region of Santiago and the cities of Valparaíso and Concepción.¹⁴ Note that urban districts are also the districts with the highest campaign spending caps, given population density.¹⁵

A Persistent Gender Gap in Campaign Funding

To see whether the gender gap in campaign funding persists when controlling for confounding factors, we performed a zero-inflated negative binomial regression with robust standard errors clustered at the district level. The zero-inflated negative binomial regression uses a negative binomial model for the positive values—in our case, to predict the amount of money given a candidate has at least one USD—and a logit model for the zero values—in our case, to predict having no money versus any money. Yet we do not have strong theoretical expectations about the factors that predict raising at least one USD when compared to raising no money. As noted throughout, the electoral landscape was new; about half the candidates had never sought elected office before; about 90% had never served in Congress before; and candidates could win outright or get dragged to victory by a more popular list companion. We therefore use the same battery of independent and control variables on both the negative binomial and logit sides of the model.¹⁶

A zero-inflated negative binomial model was appropriate: the dependent variable is a count of money received, contains a preponderance of zeros, and the variance exceeds the mean (Table 1). Vuong and Zip tests comparing the zero-inflated negative binomial model to the standard negative binomial model, and the zero-inflated negative binomial model to the zero-inflated Poisson model, respectively, showed a preference for the zero-inflated negative binomial model (Supplementary Appendix 3). The results from an alternative specification accounting for dependency among the dependent variables are consistent with the findings reported here (Supplementary Appendix 4).¹⁷

Table 3 reports our results. The district-level controls—district competitiveness, candidates per district, district poverty, the proportion of women municipal councilors, and urban/high spending districts—had little bearing on the overall results. For ease of reporting, we do not show the coefficients and standard errors for these variables (full model in Supplementary Appendix 5). We report the coefficients and standard errors for our primary variables: sex, incumbency, previous winner, party ideology, and marital status. The regression coefficients for the negative binomial portion of the model are interpreted as the expected change in logged dollars, given a one-unit change in the independent variable for interval variables, or the average difference in logged dollars between the two groups for dummy variables. The models include an interaction term for incumbent*women, which means the coefficient on women corresponds to the effect for non-incumbent women, while the coefficient on incumbent*women corresponds to the effect for incumbent women.¹⁸ Comparing these results to a base model excluding the interaction term (Supplementary Appendix 6) shows that including the interaction term changes neither the direction nor significance of sex and incumbency, and that the effect size for these two variables changes only slightly between the interaction model and the base model (in most cases, including the interaction term raises the effect size for non-incumbent women while lowering the effect size for incumbents).

Table 3.

Effects of Individual and District Characteristics on Campaign Funding.

	Party Transfers	Bank Loans	Own Resources	Donations	Combined Resources
Negative binomial
Woman	−.156^∗ (.085)	−.423^∗ (.228)	.034 (.250)	−.479^∗∗ (.199)	−.340∗∗∗ (.135)
Incumbent	1.051^∗∗∗ (.070)	.836^∗∗∗ (.190)	1.456^∗∗∗ (.202)	.945^∗∗∗ (.193)	1.486^∗∗∗ (.135)
Incumbent^∗woman	−.065 (.167)	.220 (.301)	.515^∗ (.285)	.692^∗∗ (.317)	.478^∗∗ (.189)
Previous winner	.561^∗∗∗ (.087)	.241 (.223)	.989^∗∗∗ (.169)	.586^∗∗∗ (.165)	.795^∗∗∗ (.113)
Center party	.211^∗∗ (.092)	−.076 (.217)	−.173 (.217)	−.817^∗∗∗ (.170)	−.552^∗∗∗ (.129)
Left party	.783^∗∗∗ (.096)	−.542^∗∗∗ (.169)	−.528^∗∗ (.219)	−1.147^∗∗∗ (.160)	−.580^∗∗∗ (.129)
Married	—	—	.277^∗∗ (.125)	—	—
Controls
Constant	8.406^∗∗∗ (.340)	9.227^∗∗∗ (.493)	7.749^∗∗∗ (1.232)	9.812^∗∗∗ (1.064)	10.100^∗∗∗ (.833)
Zero-inflated
Woman	−.075 (.153)	.294 (.296)	.310^∗∗ (.154)	.440^∗∗∗ (.149)	.213 (.155)
Incumbent	−1.792^∗∗∗ (.351)	−1.802^∗∗∗ (.375)	−1.806^∗∗∗ (.251)	−2.646^∗∗∗ (.664)	−19.665^∗∗∗ (.299)
Incumbent∗woman	−17.847^∗∗∗ (.552)	-.178 (.479)	.046 (.520)	−17.610^∗∗∗ (.742)	−.497 (.508)
Previous winner	−1.883^∗∗∗ (.311)	−.568 (.371)	−.580^∗∗ (.242)	−.786^∗∗∗ (.231)	−1.671^∗∗∗ (.442)
Center party	−1.060^∗∗∗ (.336)	.657^∗∗ (.285)	.499^∗ (.268)	.711^∗∗∗ (.234)	.118 (.456)
Left party	1.318^∗∗∗ (.191)	.990^∗∗∗ (.259)	.611^∗∗ (.236)	.957^∗∗∗ (.313)	1.930^∗∗∗ (.399)
Married	—	—	−.334^∗∗ (.167)	—	—
Controls
Constant	−1.686^∗∗∗ (.547)	1.140 (.913)	.172 (.735)	−.926 (.821)	−2.888^∗∗∗ (.897)
Observations	949	949	939	949	949
Log pseudolikelihood	−6199.191	−1440.548	−3492.826	−5753.303	−8252.499
Wald Chi-squared	1260.49	214.45	173.32	159.35	585.34

Zero-inflated negative binomial regression. Robust standard errors in parentheses.

^∗∗∗p < .01; ^∗∗p < .05; ^∗ p <.10.

Overall, we find that for candidates raising at least one USD, non-incumbent women raise less money than men in party transfers, bank loans, donations, and combined resources (statistically significant at the 1% or 5% level for donations and combined resources). In the model predicting own resources, sex has a positive but not significant effect, while marriage is both positive and significant. Marriage may therefore reduce the gender gap among non-incumbents and even give women an advantage. An interaction between married candidates and sex is not statistically significant, however (results not shown).¹⁹

Incumbents raise more money than non-incumbents and previous winners raise more money than never-rans and perpetual losers (statistically significant at the 1% level in all models save previous winners attaining bank loans). Incumbent women raise more money when compared to non-incumbent women, incumbent men, and non-incumbent men for all categories save party transfers (statistically significant at the 5% level for donations and combined resources). Turning to party ideology, candidates from center and left parties receive more funding in party transfers but less funding in all other categories when compared to candidates from right parties (statistically significant in most cases).

These patterns hold when predicting which candidates have zero dollars. The regression coefficients for the zero-inflated (or logit) portion of the model show the logged odds of belonging in the no-money group given a one-unit increase in the independent variable. Non-incumbent women are more likely than men to have no money in all categories save party transfers (statistically significant for own resources and donations). Incumbents and previous winners are less likely than non-incumbents and non-winners to have no money (statistically significant at the 1% or 5% level in nearly all cases). Incumbent women are also less likely to have zero dollars (statistically significant at the 1% level for party transfers and donations). Across all five models, candidates from center and left parties are statistically more likely to have zero dollars relative to candidates from right parties, with two exceptions. For own resources, married candidates are less likely to have zero dollars (statistically significant at the 5% level).

Overall, the models reveal a cash disadvantage for women but a cash advantage for incumbents and previous winners, providing further support for Hypotheses 1 through 4 (women’s disadvantage in each funding category) and Hypothesis 6 (an experience advantage). Turning to marginal effects provides a better illustration of these findings. Non-incumbent women are predicted to raise less than non-incumbent men in all five categories when holding all other variables at their mean. For instance, the predicted total value of donations is US$5584 for a non-incumbent man, compared to US$2936 for a non-incumbent woman. Similarly, the predicted total cash resources are US$13,951 for a non-incumbent man, compared to US$9038 for a non-incumbent woman. Absent an experience cue, men receive more, but with an experience cue, women sometimes do better. Take donations and combined resources again: an incumbent woman is predicted to have US$27,736 in donations and US$81,638 in combined resources, while an incumbent man is predicted to have US$21,454 in donations and US$75,446 in combined resources. Yet incumbent women’s advantage over incumbent men is not statistically significant on pairwise comparison tests, so while we cannot say with certainty that women incumbents always flip the gap relative to men incumbents, the predicted values are suggestive.

Figure 3 shows the predicted margins of sex and incumbency for all funding sources. The points show the predicted dollar value with a 95% confidence interval. Non-incumbents are predicted to have less money relative to incumbents. For non-incumbent men compared to non-incumbent women, the confidence intervals do not overlap for donations and combined resources. For incumbent men compared to incumbent women, the confidence intervals overlap for all five categories: women incumbents are predicted to have absolutely more than men incumbents from their own resources, from banks, and in total, but the small sample size (only 14 women incumbents) limits a conclusive finding. Overall, the predictions support our analysis’s main conclusion: non-incumbent women are systemically disadvantaged relative to non-incumbent men, but incumbency allows women to fundraise similar to men.

Figure 3.

Predicted amount of campaign funds by sex and incumbency, 95% confidence intervals.

Conclusion

The Chilean case allows us to analyze the gender gap in campaign funding, a key factor in men’s continuing political dominance. Echoing scholarship from the Global North and South, we find that gender disadvantages women’s access to campaign funds. As our interviewees suspected and our data confirm, money follows men and proven winners. Our findings show that absent political experience, gender serves as a powerful heuristic for who makes a good candidate. Non-incumbent women received less money than non-incumbent men across all categories: party transfers, bank loans, own resources, donations, and total cash. While the newly implemented gender quota increased women’s candidacies, never-ran women and non-incumbent women faced an uneven playing field when raising money. These gaps existed despite a gendered electoral finance scheme.

Our results offer initial evidence that political experience can reduce parties’, donors’, and lenders’ reliance on gender as a signal about candidate quality. While we found that incumbent women out-fundraise incumbent men in some categories, our findings here are only suggestive given the small sample size. In fact, the women incumbents running may have been exceptional candidates overall: they had a higher win rate when compared to men incumbents, 86% versus 73%. Yet, few women are poised to benefit from this political experience cue, since women’s marginalization from electoral politics means that fewer women have competed in previous races. Our study sounds a cautionary note about whether gendered electoral financing schemes can level the playing field for women. If women without political experience face a funding disadvantage, then countries’ efforts to recruit more women candidates via gender quotas might be insufficient, since first-time women candidates are financially disadvantaged when compared to first-time men. Indeed, Chile’s 2017 election results suggest that underfinancing women newcomers has negative consequences for women’s descriptive representation: men non-incumbents had a 14% win rate, while women non-incumbents had a 6% win rate. Overall, women comprised 41% of candidates thanks to the gender quota, but just 22.6% of victors.

Our study does leave some questions unanswered. For instance, we assume that money—particularly cash—matters, but cannot identify the mechanisms through which money shapes candidates’ success. We also cannot observe candidates’ strategic decisions about pursuing different funding sources; whether incumbents pursue different revenue streams relative to newcomers; and whether having resources in one category diminishes or increases resources in others. Similarly, though our interviews suggest that gender bias shapes access to campaign funding across all categories—and our quantitative analysis supports this conclusion—we cannot identify the precise mechanisms through which parties, donors, and others make funding decisions. Further work should explore how different actors distribute campaign money, and whether the gender cash disparities in Chile’s open-list system generalize to systems that are less candidate-centered, like closed-list systems.

Our findings support scholars’ conclusions that gendered electoral financing schemes operate symbolically (Feo & Piccio, 2019). Our interviewees likewise doubted that the incentives would truly inspire funders to support women candidates. While we do not know how actors may adapt to this scheme over time, our analysis provides a baseline measure of the gender gap in campaign funding, and future work can examine if this gap subsequently narrows. The initial evidence indicates that women newcomers do not compete in conditions equal to men, a problem that compounds due to the small number of women incumbents. Our findings suggest that policymakers and activists promoting gendered electoral financing schemes might do well to tailor incentives for women who are first-time candidates.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-cps-10.1177_00104140211024300 – Supplemental Material for Follow the Money: Gender, Incumbency, and Campaign Funding in Chile

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-cps-10.1177_00104140211024300 for Follow the Money: Gender, Incumbency, and Campaign Funding in Chile by Jennifer M. Piscopo, Magda Hinojosa, Gwynn Thomas and Peter M. Siavelis in Comparative Political Studies

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Espacio Público for making this data available. They gratefully acknowledge comments from Santiago Alles, Amy Atchison, Maria Escobar Lemmon, Kendall Funk, Sandra Håkansson, Ragnhild Muriaas, Diana Z. O’Brien, Katelyn Stauffer, Viebeke Wang, Pär Zetterberg, and participants at the 2018 annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, the 2019 European Conference on Politics and Gender, and the 2019 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Jennifer M. Piscopo

Gwynn Thomas

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online at the CPS website

Notes

Author Biographies

Jennifer M. Piscopo is Associate Professor of Politics at Occidental College. Her research on women, elections, and political representation has appeared in over 20 peer-reviewed journals.

Magda Hinojosa is Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author, with Miki Kittilson, of Seeing Women, Strengthening Politics: How Women in Politics Foster Connected Citizens (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Gwynn Thomas is Associate Professor of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her published research focuses on women’s movements, women’s political leadership and participation, and feminist institutionalism in Latin America.

Peter M. Siavelis is Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University. He has published on many aspects of Latin American and Chilean politics, including candidate selection, election systems, gender quotas, presidencies and informal institutions.

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