Emerging Research on Gender and Political Participation in Developing Countries

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Across much of the developing world, there remains a gender gap in women’s political participation. When and how do women participate in politics, and what explains the persistent inequalities in that participation between women and men? The four papers in this panel represent emerging research that together helps us better understand the barriers women face in equally participating in politics, focusing both on women as candidates seeking to hold elected office and as citizens engaging in political life, particularly outside of the electoral cycle.

Together, these papers offer important insights into the nature of women’s political participation across diverse types of engagement. In doing so, they contribute to our understanding of the consequences of improving gender equality in politics more broadly. Spanning four distinct regions – Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia – the research also allows for important cross-regional inference on the commonalities and differences across developing countries. And the panel showcases the wide array of methodologies being used in contemporary political science research on gender, from network analysis, experiments and surveys, to analysis of rich qualitative and quantitative data.

The first two papers focus on how women participate in politics as citizens, particularly in the barriers they face in engaging in politics outside of elections. First, Soledad Artiz Prillaman explores the gender gap in political participation in rural India, noting that while women vote as frequently as men, their engagement outside of the electoral cycle lags that of men significantly. To understand why, she leverages both network analysis as well as qualitative interviews, gaining important insights into how women and men’s divergent political and social networks shape their political participation, and particularly illuminating how women’s status in the home conditions their participation in the public sphere.

Next, Amanda Robinson and co-authors present the design for a field experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to increase women’s participation in local political affairs outside of elections. The intervention will study the impact of a training program with village savings and loan groups in Malawi to increase their collective efficacy and expand participants’ skills and capacity to make demands of their local government.

The final two papers in the panel focus on women’s political participation as candidates and elected officials. In Cambodia, Cesi Cruz also leverages a field experiment to study how to increase women’s likelihood of running for political office. Results from the community-based intervention that aimed to overcome the social and cultural barriers impeding women seeking office suggest that women’s propensity to become candidates can be increased if those community-level barriers are directly addressed.

Julie Anne Weaver and co-author also focus on candidates for local political office, but in a context without quotas or reservations, to understand the political fates of female candidates for mayor and how voters evaluate them in Peru and Latin America more widely. Drawing on electoral and spatial data as well as the results of a candidate choice conjoint experiment, the paper unpacks trends in how and when women choose to run for mayor and how the supply of female candidates interacts with the preferences of both male and female voters.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Gendered Networks and the Patriarchal Household - Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University

• Removing Social Barriers to Women’s Candidacy: A Field Experiment in Cambodia - Cesi Cruz, University of California, Los Angeles; Jiyoung Kim, University of California, Los Angeles; Elayne Stecher

• Engendering Women’s Collective Efficacy in Malawi: A Field Experimental Design - Amanda Lea Robinson, Ohio State University; Asiyati Lorraine Chiweza, University of Malawi; Amanda Clayton, Vanderbilt University; Boniface Madalitso Dulani

• Supply and Demand: Descriptive Representation, Gender and Local Political Office - Julie Anne Weaver, Harvard University; Audrey Latura, Harvard University

Chair

• Sarah Khan Yale University

Discussants

• Sarah Khan Yale University

• Jonathan Homola Rice University