Political parties, journalists, and voters often attribute the underrepresentation of female parliamentarians to notions of women being less interested in running for office, or being less capable politicians. These notions, however, persist even when women are successfully elected, at which point many become labeled as the ´wives´ or ´daughters´ of male politicians. Higher description representation of women, as such, would not necessarily translate into more effective substantive representation - the argument being that women from political dynasties are more directly tied to party leaders and therefore less likely to diverge from party preferences, including on issues of gender. While these notions have been widely spread by the media, which uses specific individual cases as support, it remains unclear whether these claims are supported empirically. This is due to both the fact that few works on political dynasties have focused on gender, as well as lack of appropriate data. Most works on political dynasties use surname matching to identify family ties, which is particularly problematic in countries where many families share common last names, which is often the case in Latin America. Using newly released data on Brazilian deputies from the 54th Legislature (2011-2015), I develop a measure of the strength of individuals' family ties, by taking into account types of family relationships, number of family members in politics, and order of entrance to elected offices. With this more nuanced measure I test the following hypotheses: H1) women with strong family ties to politics are more likely to be represented than women who do not belong to political dynasties; and, H2) women with strong family ties to politics are less likely to deviate from party preferences, including on issues pertaining to gender, than women who do not belong to political dynasties.
