Newly enfranchised German women in the 1920s consistently voted against the party that had secured their political rights. Despite being poorer and mobilized largely through the Social Democratic Party, women’s vote share for confessional center parties was 10 percentage points higher than men’s. To understand why, we leverage a unique institutional feature of Munich’s 1924 election: ballots counted separately by gender. This allows us to construct precinct-level observations of male and female voting behavior which we link to newly digitized pre-suffrage data on occupations, socioeconomic status, and religion. While religious identity serves as a powerful predictor of female voting behavior, proxies for material self-interest have no explanatory power, suggesting that the ’identity payoff’ dominated the ’redistributive payoff’ for newly enfranchised women. Our findings demonstrate that cultural and religious identity, more than material self-interest, can shape the voting behavior of disadvantaged groups.
Bühler et al. (Wed,) studied this question.