From Seeing to Believing: How Female Representation Shapes Support for Democracy

• In Event: Comparative Politics of Gender and Politics

Abstract

How does women’s representation in government influence citizens' support for democratic institutions? Scholars have long recognized the role of descriptive representatives and "the politics of presence" in shaping perceptions of institutional legitimacy among members of historically excluded social groups (Dovi 2002; Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995). Existing research examining the influence of women’s descriptive representation on individual attitudes and behavior, however, tends to focus on how seeing one’s social group represented in government influences political participation and engagement (Barnes and Burchard 2013; Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Campbell and Wolbrecht 2006; Kittilson and Schwindt-Bayer 2012; Liu and Banaszak 2017; Reingold and Harrell 2010; Wolbrecht and Campbell 2007), feelings of political efficacy (Atkeson and Carrillo 2007; Karp and Banducci 2008), perceived institutional legitimacy (Clayton, O’Brien, and Piscopo 2019), and political knowledge (Dassonneville and McAllister 2018; Wolak 2020). Building upon existing literature on the role of socialization, institutional performance, and group interest representation in shaping citizens' support for political institutions, I offer three possible theoretical mechanisms by which levels of female representation in government may influence citizens' commitment to democracy and derive hypotheses corresponding to each possible explanation. Combining multiple waves of the World Values Survey and European Values Study fielded between 2010 and 2020 with country level data on the percentage of female legislative representatives and cabinet ministers in 55 countries, I employ a series of hierarchical logistic regression models with cross-level interactions to test each hypothesis. I find the representation of women in positions of political power has a substantive impact on citizens' support for democratic institutions, particularly among women.

Author

• Adam Jordan Nafa, University of North Texas