The Gender Turnout Gap Revisited: When Do Women Participate (Un)Equally?

• In Event: Gender and Politics in the Global South 2

Abstract

When do women participate equally in the electoral process? Previous scholarship has focused mainly on economic development and female labor force participation to explain why after decades of lagging behind, female turnout caught up with male turnout in industrialized democracies beginning in the 1980s. Yet, as my research shows, modernization and employment only insufficiently explain variation and change in the gender gap in turnout that we observe both across and within countries, particularly in the developing world. India, for example, recorded a gender gap in turnout of almost 10 percentage points in favor of men through a period of unprecedented economic growth in the 2000s, before rapidly closing the gap over the past 15 years in the poorest, but not the most prosperous states of the country. Bosnia and Herzegovina, by contrast, has outperformed India economically for the past 20 year, yet still sees men vote at persistently higher rates than women. Armenia’s female labor force participation rate is 47 percent, almost as much as Costa Rica’s (48 percent) or South Africa’s (49.5 percent); yet in Armenia, women vote at almost 3 percentage point lower rates than men, while in Costa Rica and South Africa, women turn out at more than 5 percentage point higher rates than their male counterparts.
Based on an in-depth investigation of India, I propose that it is social gender norms, not economic development or employment, that determine relative levels of female participation. When social gender norms hit a threshold of equitability, a woman enjoys more mobility outside the home. This allows her to participate in elections, which are socially sanctioned communal events that happen only infrequently. As such, electoral participation is less likely to be seen as a challenge to household or community norms than other forms of participation, such as taking up a job or holding assets in her own name, both of which have the power to alter power relations between men and women within a single household or in a community.
Importantly, changes in social gender norms are not necessarily dependent on levels of economic development or women’s employment, as modernization theory would suggest. Instead, I find that even low levels of economic development and female labor force participation can be conducive to norm changes, if they increase incentives for spatial mobility: as economic liberalization and natural disasters have led to a steady stream of internal and international male labor migrants in India, I argue that the household – a central decision-making unit in India and many other developing countries – is transforming. When young men leave the household in search of employment while women and older family members stay behind, a woman’s status within the household changes. My analysis of large-scale surveys shows that women in migrant households are more mobile outside the home, have more decision-making power and are more likely to take part in the family’s agricultural activities, but not more likely to be otherwise engaged in the labor force. Using a new timeseries dataset of administrative turnout data by gender in combination with survey evidence, I then show that locations with higher levels of male outmigration indeed see smaller gender gaps in turnout. Geo-located information on natural disasters allows me to causally identify this effect.
This article makes several important contributions. First, understanding women’s electoral participation – and the factors that hinder or aid it – is normatively important. In a democracy, voting is the fundamental participatory act, and any democracy where half of the population faces systemic obstacles to equal participation could reasonably be considered flawed. Second, this work challenges the traditional view that economic development needs to predate women’s equal participation, instead identifying conditions under which women’s voter turnout increases in low-income contexts. As such, my research is highly relevant for policy-makers by highlighting alternative routes to political empowerment. Third, I shed light on a previously understudied aspect of labor migration: the effects of male labor migration on women’s lives, and on political behavior in sending regions more generally. Lastly, as part of my research I collect a series of new quantitative data that will be available to other researchers.

Author

• Franziska Roscher, New York University