What are the effects of gender quotas on the educational attainment of municipality councils? While extensive research examines the political consequences of gender quotas, their impact on the educational qualifications of elected officials remains unclear. This paper provides novel evidence from Spain, analyzing 119,624 elected municipal councilors across the 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2015 elections. Using a difference-in-discontinuities research design, we compare outcomes before and after quota implementation in municipalities below and above the population threshold for quota enforcement. Our results show that, on average, gender quotas have no significant effect on the educational composition of elected male and female councilors. Thus, while quotas successfully increase female representation, they appear neutral regarding the overall education levels of elected politicians. However, further analyses reveal that quotas increase the average education level of elected politicians in municipalities with initially lower education levels, but decrease it in those with higher pre-quota education levels.

The authors wish to thank seminar participants at the Oviedo Economics Seminars, the Associate Editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Manuel Bagues for sharing part of the dataset used in Bagues and Campa (2021). Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID28020-118585GB-100).