Gender and political effort: how female incumbents outperform male counterparts in grant seeking

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The literature shows that men and women behave differently in politics. This paper studies how gender affects local politicians' efforts to secure external funding for their constituencies. Using data from a large discretionary grant programme for Slovak municipalities, we find that (1) female incumbents outperform their male counterparts by requesting grants more actively; (2) this gap widens in favour of women as mayoral tenure increases; and (3) mayors of both genders follow similar electoral-cycle patterns. Grant requests are frequent at the start of the term, then decline, but rise again in election years, probably reflecting mayors' efforts to impress voters.