Foreign Aid and Gender Parity in the Cabinet

• In Event: The Effects of Leaders' Gender on Foreign Policy Decision-making

Abstract

In quick succession, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa appointed gender parity cabinets. What motivated the appointment of so many women cabinet ministers?
The paper argues that the selection of ministers in aid-dependent and/or indebted countries responds not only to domestic political demands and fault lines, but also to external cues – and that the latter explain the increased representation of women in the cabinets of Sub-Saharan African countries.
We draw on literature on ministerial stability and ministerial recruitment to argue that, unlike democracies in the global north where cabinet formation is driven by domestic political criteria, the leaders of aid-dependent and highly indebted regimes in the global south must balance domestic and external pressures in the selection of ministers.
Such pressures manifest themselves in greater women’s representation in government, because donors perceive such appointments as a commitment to gender equality (Bush, 2011; Edgell, 2017; Valdini 2019). Donors value such a commitment because of the widespread perception that women leaders are associated with positive development outcomes, such as improving governance and reducing corruption (Dollar et al, 2001; Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003; Esarey and Chirillo, 2013; Tripp, 2015).
The paper uses original data on the gender composition as well as a measure of the type of posts to which they are assigned (Krook and O’Brien 2012) of Sub-Saharan African cabinets.

Author

• Marijke Breuning, University of North Texas