Abstract
Violence against women (VAW) affects at least 35% of women worldwide.
The need to combat VAW is seemingly noncontroversial: As existing work
shows, ideology does not explain governments’ propensity to adopt
anti-VAW legislation. Yet, effectively implementing anti-VAW legislation
requires complex policy frameworks at odds with conservative values.
Voters’ preferences can meaningfully influence policy outputs, so can
electoral conservatism make women more vulnerable to violence? Employing
data from 5,570 Brazilian municipalities, we find that conservatism in
the electorate is associated with the adoption of fewer anti-VAW
policies. With data from a nationally-representative survey of Brazilian
respondents (N=2,086), we then show that conservative voters are less
likely to prioritize the need for tackling VAW. That is, the adoption of
fewer anti-VAW policies in conservative municipalities reflects
conservative voters’ policy preferences. Critically, our results suggest
that in contexts where the electorate holds conservative preferences,
policy responsiveness may incur costs to women’s lives.