Experimental Studies on the Grassroots Participation and Representation of Women

Session Submission Type: Full Submitted Panel

Session Description

This panel presents new experimental research examining constraints on and effects of greater women’s political participation and representation in local-level politics. The panel is comparative in focus, exploring the common themes underlying pervasive gender gaps in local-level women’s political incorporation that exist in new and advanced democracies alike. Two studies are innovative survey experiments and two studies are large-scale field experiments.

The panel’s first two papers [Preece et al. and Clayton et al.] use similar survey experimental methodologies to address a series of closely related questions: to what extent and why do voters evaluate female candidates for local office differently than male candidates? Despite these similarities, the two papers examine these behavioral constraints on the selection of women as local representatives in very different contexts -- local elections in the US and in Malawi, a new democracy in southern Africa.

The panel’s second two papers [Ichino & Nathan and Prillaman] complement this focus on the selection of women into formal leadership positions with studies of the participation of regular voters in local political life. Each of this second set of papers employs a field experimental intervention to examine women’s political participation at the grassroots level, leveraging similar civic education campaigns that aim to increase women’s participation in different contexts: Ghana and India. Prillaman focuses on identifying strategies to effectively encourage grassroots participation among poor Indian women who face significant hurdles against political activism. Ichino & Nathan instead focus on the downstream economic and political effects of an intervention that increases women’s grassroots participation in Ghana.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 51: EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH

Chair

• Dawn L. Teele University of Pennsylvania

Discussants

• Dawn L. Teele University of Pennsylvania

• Rikhil R Bhavnani University of Wisconsin, Madison

Individual Presentations

• Party Organization and Women’s Empowerment: A Field Experiment in Ghana - Noah Nathan, University of Michigan; Nahomi Ichino, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• When is Information Power? An Experiment on Women’s Participation in India - Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Oxford University

• How Voters Evaluate Candidate Gender: Experimental Evidence from Malawi - Amanda Clayton, Vanderbilt University; Martha C. Johnson, Mills College; Ragnhild Louise Muriaas, University of Bergen; Amanda Lea Robinson, Ohio State University

• Selection and Self-Presentation: The Double Bind and Women's Representation - Jessica Robinson Preece, Brigham Young University; Christopher F. Karpowitz, Brigham Young University; Quin Monson, Brigham Young University; Alejandra Gimenez, Stanford University