Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment

• In Event: Rethinking the Role of Resources in Women’s Political Participation

Abstract

Gendered imbalances in political spaces are widespread. While women may have attained universal suffrage, women are less present than men in most political institutions (World Bank 2012). Even when women are present, they often hold less political authority and are less likely to be heard than men (Karpowitz and Mendelberg 2014). Despite the need for and benefits from women’s political empowerment, few frameworks exist to assess and diagnose the extent of prevailing political power imbalances, particularly at the individual level. Further, unlike economic empowerment, political empowerment — the ability to choose when and how one interacts with political institutions — has received less scholarly attention.

Political empowerment refers to the process by which those who have been denied the ability and agency to express their voice in the political system acquire such an ability (adapted from Kabeer 1999). Measurement of gendered political behavior and progress towards gender equality in political science often focuses on actual political participation and on political preferences and demand making. These measures fail to capture the core aspect of the definition of political empowerment - the presence of agency. Our paper proposes a theoretical framework to conceptualize the process of political empowerment at an individual level, including the importance of agency. We use this framework to develop a set of survey questions to construct a measure of women’s political empowerment at the individual-level, which we call the Women’s Empowerment as Political Citizens Index (WEP Citizens Index).

The paper then uses original data from three surveys in several villages in Madhya Pradesh, India, to test the reliability and validity of our measure. The first survey was conducted as per usual academic surveying practices with a team of external surveyors. The second survey was conducted as per a common practice of practitioner organizations and employed community-based data collectors. Finally, our third survey comprises a census from six villages. The WEP Citizens Index is reliable and valid across these datasets, and our analysis shows that political empowerment encompasses but is also different from measures of political participation. We then deploy this measure to replicate findings from other studies of the drivers of women’s political participation to understand how and when such drivers shift political empowerment - political resources, political agency, and political action. Our results have implications for outcome measurement studies of women’s political inclusion.

Authors

• Natalya Adam-Rahman, Stanford University

• Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University