Local crimes against women actually change national election results, but only if the guy who did it is a citizen.
Analyzing a decade of data, researchers found that femicides lead to a 2.2% drop in votes for center-right parties and lower female turnout. However, this political backlash completely disappears if the killer is a foreigner, showing how identity cues dictate whether voters blame the state for failing to protect them.
Voting After Gendered Shocks: The Impact of Femicides on Electoral Preferences
SSRN · 6338578
We estimate how local femicides affect voting and turnout in subsequent Italian parliamentary elections. We merge a geocoded registry of femicides (2011-2022) with municipality-level results for the national elections (2013, 2018, 2022) and exploit staggered exposure to a municipality's first femicide. Using difference-indifferences estimators designed for staggered adoption, we find an electoral backlash against the Center-Right coalition: its vote share falls by about 2.2 percentage points, wi