There is prolific anecdotal evidence that female politicians are often the spouse or blood relative to another politician, but there is a lack of research on whether family ties really play different roles for the political recruitment and promotions of men and women. We analyze this question using panel dataset that covers all Swedish local politicians and their parents, siblings, children, and spouses, a total of more than 1.3 million individuals. Family ties are found to be substantially more important for the recruitment of women than for men, and the gender difference is even larger regarding promotions. This suggests that family ties could play a more important role in women's access to power. In an extension to our main analysis we show that the implementation of a zipper gender quota for the party ballots of a Swedish political party, the Social Democrats, did not have an impact on the recruitment of dynastic women.
