Removing Social Barriers to Women’s Candidacy: A Field Experiment in Cambodia

• In Event: Emerging Research on Gender and Political Participation in Developing Countries

Abstract

Initiatives to address women’s participation in consolidating democracies tend to focus on individual actions such as voting, civic education, or joining political organizations. However, in many countries, the barriers to women’s participation are largely social or cultural, necessitating new approaches that address entire communities and not only individual women. This paper presents results of a randomized control trial to evaluate new community-based initiatives to promote women’s candidacy in Cambodia. Treatments were designed at the community level, both to encourage women to run and to encourage the community as a whole to support women in office. These community-based treatments significantly increased women’s candidacy for commune council, both in terms of the total number of women running and the share of women candidates. The treatment communes have 3 more female candidates than comparable control communes, an increase of 19% over the average number of female candidates in the control communes. The treatment also increased the relative share of female candidates by almost 2.5 percentage-points.

Authors

• Cesi Cruz, University of California, Los Angeles

• Jiyoung Kim, University of California, Los Angeles

• Elayne Stecher