What’s in It for Me?: An Experiment on Who Joins the Vietnam Women’s Union

• In Event: Varieties and Challenges in Political Participation in an Age of Misinformation

Abstract

Who joins mass organizations in single-party and dominant party regimes and why? Women’s organizations, which are ubiquitous in party-based regimes, are important in two respects (Donna and Kreft 2019). First, research attributes the stability of party-based regimes in part to the ability of mass organizations to mobilize regime support (Reuter 2022). Second, women’s organizations are often the best situated actors to set up small-scale women’s savings groups, which many NGOs use to implement projects designed to increase women’s participation in politics. As such, understanding what motivates women to join such organizations is important in determining who these groups are reaching. Existing research emphasizes the importance of selective incentives to drive participation (Palmer-Rubin, Garay and Poertner 2021). We argue that selective incentives will work primarily for those not already connected to the regime. Furthermore, it will work only where the ability to deliver such incentives are credible. Using a field experiment in Vietnam, this paper tests the impact of a recruitment experiment encouraging women to participate in training program organized by the Vietnam Women’s Union. Consistent with the argument, it shows that selective incentives had widely divergent effects depending on the credibility of the ability of the Women’s Union to provide such selective incentives as well as the closeness of the women to the regime. These findings have important implications for literature on women's political participation specifically and incentives to join regime-linked mass organizations more generally.

Authors

• Paul J. Schuler, University of Arizona

• Eitan Paul, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Mai Thanh Truong, Marquette University

• Markus Taussig, Harvard Business School

• Quynh Nguyen, University of Berne