By: Isobel Kemp, University of Barcelona
The following blog post summarizes the research that was the winner of the 2026 Midwest Political Science Association’s Sophonisba Breckinridge Award and the Richard E. Matland Award for research presented at the 2025 MPSA Annual Conference.
This paper explores the preconditions for intra-marital influence on women’s electoral participation following enfranchisement. In these historical contexts, dominant social norms often positioned the household as a hierarchical unit with the husband at the head, and anti-suffrage arguments often included the assumption that women’s political behaviour would follow these dynamics, aligning with the preferences of their husbands rather than being independently formed.
These expectations reflected the broader social and economic constraints shaping women’s lives, including their relative exclusion from the labour market, education, and political life. In this context, it is therefore reasonable to expect a high degree of intra-marital influence. Husbands, with greater exposure to political environments and prior political experience, could act as intermediaries, transmitting political information and messages encountered outside the home, motivating partners through persuasive discussion or, in more coercive forms, pressure, and providing logistical support that reduced the costs of participation. In this way, even women with low levels of political engagement and limited personal resources could be mobilised to vote if their husbands were politically engaged. However, this was not the only route into participation. Recent research shows that exposure to extra-household organisations—such as political parties and activist networks—can also increase women’s participation. What remains unclear is whether and how these different sources of influence interact.
In this paper, I propose a key moderating condition: a husband’s political influence is conditional on his wife’s access to alternative, extra-household sources of political information, motivation, and support. When such external channels exist—and when women are able to engage with them—the relative influence of the husband declines. I posit labour force participation as one potential mechanism in facilitating this process. Work outside the home embeds women in politicised social environments that can substitute for household-based mobilisation rather than merely complement it, by providing access to political networks, reinforcing identification with collective experiences, and generating independent material resources that reduce reliance on the household.
I test this mechanism in the context of 1930s Barcelona, which combines recent female enfranchisement with dense networks of political mobilisation. The city’s large textile sector—one of the few feminised and relatively organised industries—provides a setting in which workplace-based political engagement could plausibly extend to women. For this, I constructed a novel dataset, digitising and matching individuals across three historical registers—the household census, electoral rolls, and voting lists—creating a panel of approximately 4,500 married couples with detailed information on turnout, socioeconomic characteristics, household and building-level composition, and spatial exposure to political organisations. Together this allows me to observe both individual behaviour and the social environments in which it occurs.
My empirical analysis focuses on how the marginal effect of a husband’s turnout on his wife’s participation varies with exposure to external mobilisation. I measure direct exposure through proximity to political clubs, and indirect exposure through turnout among neighbours within the residential building. I find that external mobilisation reduces the marginal effect of the husband’s turnout—sometimes eliminating it entirely—but only for employed women. These effects are strongest in areas close to textile factories, suggesting that workplace environments play a key role in connecting women to political networks and reinforcing their responsiveness to mobilisation. By contrast, I find no evidence of substitution for housewives. Although they may be exposed to similar local environments, this exposure does not translate into independent participation. These effects persist under alternative specifications exploiting a shift in the anarchist union’s electoral strategy as a mobilisation shock. In this case, the effects of proximity to anarchist political organisations on women’s turnout are observed only after the move away from abstentionism in 1936.
Overall, these findings make several contributions to our understanding of women’s early political participation. They show that it cannot be understood through either external mobilisation or household influence in isolation, but instead reflects their interaction: reliance on husbands declines as alternative sources of political engagement become available. They further show that employment conditions this process, particularly where it embeds women in highly mobilised environments. Finally, the results underscore that turnout alone is not sufficient to capture women’s political incorporation: similar participation rates may reflect very different underlying dynamics of autonomy, dependence, and interdependence. The household therefore emerges not as a fixed constraint, but as a conditional mechanism whose importance varies with women’s broader social and economic environments.
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