Is Gender Diplomacy Effective? Quotas and International Perceptions of Democracy in Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: Gender and International Relations

Abstract

In 2019, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) implemented a gender quota reserving half of the forty seats in its consultative Federal National Council for women. Extant scholarship argues that gender quotas are a form of “genderwashing” that autocrats strategically use to make their country appear more democratic. Yet, when it comes to the impact of quotas on foreign public opinion, this hypothesis is untested. We conceptualize Gender Diplomacy as the visible, strategic use of women as a public diplomacy and nation-branding strategy to improve international perceptions of the projecting state among foreign governments and publics. Using a web-based survey experiment, we randomly expose 800 US-based students to a vignette and photo of either an all-male Federal National Council described as having 40 seats or a mixed-gender Council described as having a quota reserving 50 percent of seats for women and assess the impact on respondents’ perceptions of the level of democracy in the UAE. The results show that Gender Diplomacy improves perceptions of democracy in the UAE, and it does so among nearly all sub-groups in our US sample. We argue that this effect is due to the implicit association between positive gender-based trait stereotypes such as honesty, which may be explicitly held, and the country of the UAE. By conceptualizing gender diplomacy and experimentally testing the mechanism underlying its impact on US students’ views of the UAE, our research contributes to debates among scholars and practitioners about the complex effects of women’s empowerment in authoritarian and patriarchal settings.

Authors

• Lindsay J. Benstead, Portland State University

• Elif Sari Genc, Portland State University