Rethinking the Role of Resources in Women’s Political Participation

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel includes four papers about the measurement and drivers of women’s political participation in the global South. The dominant explanation for the gender gap in political participation centers on the role of economic resources. The four papers in this panel emphasize alternative ways that economics shapes women’s political behavior, from the role of economic institutions, economic bargaining power, and climate shocks. Together, the papers broaden the meaning of and explanations for how economic systems generate disparities in women’s political participation. They emphasize the role of paid and unpaid work, care and non-care work, and more broadly the effect of economic empowerment and agency on women’s political engagement. In a literature where participation is often measured as a behavioral binary, the papers contribute by demonstrating the varied nature of political engagement, and how economics can differentially shape these various forms of interaction with the state.

In their paper titled “Electoral Reforms and the Gender Gap: Evidence from Post-Suffrage Chile,” Teele, Callis, and Tuñón emphasize democratizing reforms, an institutional explanation, for women’s electoral participation in a developing country, compared to prior work on this topic focused on the world’s richest economies. These reforms led to a decrease in women’s participation areas with labor repressive agriculture, altering the value that women voters have to actors such as landlords and party operatives. The authors highlight the connection between the contours of the labor market and women’s value in the political market.

In a second paper, titled “Climate Shocks & COVID-19: Gendered effects on political preferences & behavior,” Brulé and Dixit use local geo-spatial data, existing survey data, and survey experiments to theorize the differential impact of COVID-19 and climate change on Bangladeshi women’s political participation. They argue that labor is explicitly gendered and the change in the gendered division of labor, due to the onset of COVID-19, alters women’s political preferences, and, in doing so, their autonomy and ability to create political, economic, and social change. Overall, the paper connects COVID-19 and climate change to economic agency and women’s political preferences for redistribution.

A third paper titled “The Gendered [Socio-]Economic Determinants of Political Behavior: Evidence from Nigeria”, by Nwakanma, argues that varying routes to economic empowerment for women have different effects on women’s political empowerment due to a gendered distribution of social power. The author uses participant observation, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and survey data analysis, in addition to drawing insights from transnational, Black, and African feminist literature.

Finally, the panel includes a related paper that theorizes and measures political empowerment: “Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment: The Women as Citizens in Politics Empowerment Index” (Narain, Prillaman, and Rahman). Using survey and census datasets in the Indian context, the paper proposes and validates a measure of political empowerment. The authors argue that agency, mostly studied in the economics literature, is an important outcome in studies of women’s political inclusion. The paper expands our conception of political inequalities beyond the descriptive presence of women in political spaces to the authentic representation of women in political decision-making.

Overall, our panel presents an opportunity for papers on women in politics in a range of geographical areas and time periods, as well as using a variety of methodological approaches, to come into conversation with one another.

Sub Unit

• Division 31: Women and Politics Research

Individual Presentations

• Electoral Reforms and the Gender Gap: Evidence from Post-Suffrage Chile - Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University; Anna Firestone Callis, University of California, Berkeley; Guadalupe Tuñón, Princeton University

• Climate Shocks & COVID-19: Gendered Effects on Political Preferences & Behavior - Rachel E. Brule, Boston University; Akshay Govind Dixit, Harvard University

• The Gendered [Socio-]Economic Determinants of Political Behavior - Pamela Nwakanma, Harvard University

• Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment - Natalya Adam-Rahman, Stanford University; Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University

Chair

• Diana Z. O'Brien Rice University

Discussant

• Mala Htun University of New Mexico