Climate Shocks & COVID-19: Gendered Effects on Political Preferences & Behavior

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

Abstract

How does exposure to exogenous shocks alter women's political preferences and behavior, and broader norms around women's participation in politics? The goal of this study is to understand the differential impact of two types of shocks: climate change-induced disasters and Covid-19 in Bangladesh.

We consider these shocks as “gendered” because their primary impact travels through traditional norms that identify “care” work as women's responsibility (Folbre 2008, Iversen and Rosenbluth 2010, Teele et al. 2018). Either type of shock increases traditionally female “care” work by an order of magnitude. Yet these shocks also have a striking impact on income-generating labor outside the home, which norms typically identify as men's primary responsibility. Each crisis destabilizes “male” labor, forcing women to encroach upon male labor while simultaneously requiring them to perform extreme levels of female labor. As a result, we expect that either shock will make the existing, sexual division of labor untenable for women, resulting in new preferences about redistribution, not only of economic resources but also of authority within the political and social structures that distribute opportunities and support as necessary for personal (and familial) survival.

The result is a dramatic shift of the risks and responsibilities for ensuring personal and familial survival toward women, simultaneously altering the gender balance of economic agency (which increases following climate shocks and decreases following Covid-19). We hypothesize that each shock will increase women's preferences for systemic change, in line with existing theories about the dynamics of societal support for redistribution.

We anticipate that women's ability to translate preferences into action in favoring political, economic, or social change should vary with the type and severity of shock(s) to which she is exposed. A given shock's impact on the household structure and intra-household dynamics may either expand or diminish the scope of female autonomy. We predict that where shocks expand female autonomy, they should also create openings for individual women's political engagement as well as opportunities to rethink broader norms around women's involvement in collective (political, economic, and social) action.

Our intuition follows evidence that widespread support for state-led redistribution of wealth is triggered by mass conscription for war, which disproportionately harms the least wealthy in the service of ensuring a given citizenry's collective survival (Scheve and Stasavage, 2016, 2012). In this case, we conceptualize redistribution as a reordering of power, which could occur in political, economic, or social domains.

We focus on Bangladesh given the juxtaposition of women's relatively high levels of political agency alongside the country's extreme vulnerability to climate change. Our analysis identifies the impact of micro-level climate and pandemic shocks on individual mobility, income, political preferences and behavior. To do so, we draw upon a panel of high-frequency local geo-spatial data on weather patterns that we have just built to measure micro-level exposure to climate shocks, secondary data from multiple waves of Demographic and Health Surveys, and unique evidence of gendered exposure to climate change- and COVID-19-induced disruptions alongside political engagement, via surveys with embedded experiments conducted with representative samples of relevant populations in Bangladesh between 2020-2021.

Authors

• Rachel E. Brule, Boston University

• Akshay Govind Dixit, Harvard University