Local crimes against women actually change national election results, but only if the guy who did it is a citizen.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Voting After Gendered Shocks: The Impact of Femicides on Electoral Preferences
SSRN · 6338578
The Takeaway
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.
From the abstract
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