Emotions, Permission, & Women’s Political Participation: Evidence from Pakistan

• In Event: Experiments on Gender and Women's Participation

Abstract

A rich literature in political science explores how emotions --anger, fear, disgust and anxiety -- shape individuals’ political behavior. Increasingly, scholars are relying on experimental manipulation of emotions among study subjects to identify the causal impact of specific emotions on outcomes related to political behavior including self-reported willingness to engage in a set of participatory actions (Valentino et al, 2011), foreign policy attitudes (Kupatadze and Zeitzoff, forthcoming) and expression of dissent against a regime (Young 2019). In this paper, we study the effect of randomized emotional cues among 4000 men and women on willingness to participate in a set of political actions in the leadup to the 2018 national election in Pakistan. The study aims to understand the persistent gender gap in political participation in our context, and in particular the role of emotions in sustaining and/or closing this gap. To this end, we first ask whether similar emotional cues have systematically different mobilizing/dampening effects on participation for men and women. Second, we develop and test a theory of how other people’s (men’s) emotional states may matter for individual women’s participation.

Existing experimental studies that manipulate emotions study how induced emotions in an individual affect participatory outcomes for that same individual. However, in our context, women have systematically limited agency over their own political participation: survey and anecdotal evidence suggests that women’s ability to participate is contingent upon successfully negotiating permission to participate with a male household member. Keeping with this model of decision-making, we study not just whether induced emotions affect individual willingness to participate, but also whether they shape men and women’s expectations of permission for women to participate. The paper makes a contribution by developing and testing a theory of how in a setting where women’s agency is limited, others’ (men’s) emotions may matter for individual women’s political participation.

Authors

• Sarah Khan, Yale University

• Asad Liaqat, Harvard University

• Ali Cheema, Lahore University of Management Sciences

• Shandana Khan Mohmand, Institute of Development Studies