Title: Women at the polls: Reexamining their role in the 1933 right-wing triumph in Spain
Room: E22
Time: 12:30
Abstract: Women first exercised the right to vote in Spain in 1933. During the parliamentary debate on the extension of the right to vote, some detractors argued that women were going to follow the dictates of the church and would vote for conservative parties. Eventually, the right won the elections of 1933. In this paper we use a municipal-level database that we have compiled on electoral results in the three parliamentary elections of 1931, 1933 and 1936. The database contains information on just over half of the Spanish municipalities. We find a positive association between the percentage of female population in the municipality and the change in the percentage of votes received by conservative parties both from 1931 to 1933 and from 1931 to 1936. We also see that this correlation disappears when we consider only municipalities with more than 1,000 inhabitants.