This version 2/4/12.

Does the election of women in the US cause other women to vote or run for office themselves? The election of women to local legislatures reduces bias against female officeholding and increases women’s political participation in India, though it remains unclear whether the same effects exist in polities like the US where a substantial number of women already hold office. I employ a regression discontinuity approach and data on 3,813 state legislative elections where a woman opposed a man and find that the election of additional women to office does not cause more women to run for office, win office, or to turn out vote in the US. The precision of these null estimates rules out even substantively small effects. The results shed light on the remaining barriers to women’s participation in American politics; specifically, these challenges appear to go beyond what further increases in female officeholding can itself erode