Social Movement Complementarity: Labor and Voting Rights in France, 1870-1940 (SOCMOV)

Holder

Olivia Tsoutsoplidi (Sciences Po, Département d'économie)

Description

This paper studies the coordination of collective action around a focal issue -women’s voting rights- within a constituency heterogeneous along an economic dimension (e.g., income), and how it responds to mobilization on a second, aligned issue—labor rights. The empirical setting is early twentieth-century France, during the emergence of an organized suffrage movement. The project construct a new municipality-by-year panel combining local membership in the national suffrage association (1909–1940) with measures of unionization and strikes (1884–1940). To address endogeneity, it will implement a shift-share (Bartik) instrumental-variables strategy exploiting differential exposure to national industry shocks. The analysis evaluates whether labor mobilization crowds out or reinforces suffrage activism, and how this relationship varies with local socio-economic structure. The project complement the empirical analysis with a simple model of multi-issue collective action in which heterogeneous agents allocate finite resources across causes, generating testable predictions on cross-issue spillovers and coordination.