February 2022
Papers on teenage gender attitudes, speaking styles, and more
Welcome to the February 2022 issue of the Gender & Politics Research Substack. Going forward, this newsletter will be jointly written by Bhumi Purohit and Annabelle Hutchinson. Annabelle studies gender and race in the U.S. at Yale’s Political Science Department and you can follow her on Twitter.
Bhumi will focus on research centered on Latin America, Asia, MENA, and Africa whereas Annabelle will summarize work conducted in the U.S., Europe, and the Global North. We’re excited to work together and expand how many articles we can cover! If you have upcoming or recently published work on gender and politics, do reach out.
Castorena, Oscar (2022). “Female Officeholders and Women’s Political Engagement: The Role of Parties.” Political Behavior.
Do female officeholders influence women to run for office? Previous results on this role model effect have been mixed; Beaman et al. (2009) and Bhavnani (2009) find positive effects in India, whereas Bhalotra et al. (2018) and Broockman (2014) find null effects in India and the U.S., respectively. Castorena adds to this literature by arguing that we may observe role model effects early on when women express interest in joining politics, but not in candidacy which is often dictated by party selection. Castorena empirically tests this hypothesis by examining the impact of a woman’s election in Mexico’s 2012 legislative elections using panel data. Results are outlined below, and should be viewed as correlational:
Greater political engagement among women: Election of women in t-1 had a positive effect on women’s self-reported interest in politics during time t, but not men’s. Women also reported that they were more likely to discuss politics with others, whereas men’s self-report goes down after a woman is elected.
Greater pre-candidacy of women: There are more predicted female pre-candidates in districts where a woman had won a previous election, as well as where women had won in neighboring districts. There were no such effects amongst male pre-candidates. Pre-candidacy is measured by the number of nominations for one of the parties, PAN.
Candidacy of women: Despite an increase in nominations for women, PAN was no more likely to select women as candidates in either open or closed primaries; instead, women’s candidacy was relegated to women-reserved seats.
This paper is an important theoretical contribution to role-model effects, but it produces these insights in a setting where incumbency is limited by rule. As the author discusses, this is a feature of the design that helps rule out incumbency effects found by prior literature. It also shows the important barrier posed by parties, which others have discussed extensively before. However, where incumbency is common, pre-candidacy impacts may be theoretically subdued if citizens know that a strong female politician is likely to reseek election. Of course, research is needed to understand whether or not this is the case. Moreover, upcoming work by Tanushree Goyal shows that female politicians invest in grassroots mobilization of women at lower levels within parties which may explain increased political engagement in some cases, but long-term effects on aspirations for candidacy are unclear.
Vaidehi Tandel, Arnab Dutta, Sahil Gandhi, and Ashwini Narayanan (2022). “Women’s right to property and the quantity-quality trade-off of children: Evidence from India.” Working Paper.
The paper examines whether a positive wealth shock, in this case granting property rights to women, encourages women to have fewer children and thereby increase the number of resources given to these children (which the authors call a quantity-quality tradeoff). Quality is measured by the height-for-age z-score of children, which evaluates stunting.
The authors use two analyses to examine the effects using two sources of data. One, they use difference-in-difference framework to examine the effects of state laws in Karnataka, Andhra, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu which, passed between 1976-1994, gave unmarried women the right to claim their father’s property upon his death. They exploit the variation in the implementation of the law. Two, they examine the effect of the federal Hindu Succession Amendment Act of 2005 by comparing two waves of IHDS panel data. The treatment variable here is the death of a woman’s father after 2005.
The authors find that the state-level reforms increased the number of children born to women affected by the law, and it had a stronger effect for sons than daughters. Relatedly, there was no significant impact on stunting outcomes for children. The findings for the federal amendment are opposite; women had 0.22-0.28 fewer children and fewer sons, and these children were less likely to be stunted.
The results, as the authors note themselves, should be interpreted cautiously as the identification strategies do not capture whether women actually sought to inherit property or actually inherited it. As Rachel Brulé shows in her recent book, there’s quite a bit of variance (and backlash) in women’s ability to inherit property. In a related paper, also see García-Morán and Yate’s work in World Development which discusses how women are unable to translate legal land rights to land ownership, use, and control in Mexico due to gendered social norms.
Uche Eseosa Ekhator-Mobayode, Lucia C.Hanmer, Eliana Rubiano-Matulevich, and Diana Jimena Arango (2022). “The effect of armed conflict on intimate partner violence: Evidence from the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria.” World Development, 153(105780).
Given the dearth of data in conflict-affected areas, disentangling the effects of conflict on intimate partner violence (IPV) from associated risk factors is a challenging task. The authors get at this by using GPS coordinates and panel data from the Nigerian Demographic and Health Surveys; the 2008 NDHS panel was conducted before the Boko Haram insurgency, and the 2013 was conducted during the insurgency. The code the GPS locations from NDHS to locations of Boko Haram events reported in ACLED, and define exposure to the conflict as residence within 10km radius of any BH event during the study period. Using the variation in time and location, the authors employ a difference-in-difference model. Furthermore, they use a kernel-based propensity score model to find women who are similar on observables in BH affected and unaffected areas.
The authors find that exposure to BH conflict increases the probability of a woman experiencing controlling behavior by their husband or partner by 13.8 pp. While this behavior is mitigated if a woman earns any kind of income, it is exacerbated, on average, if women condone IPV as a social norm, have witnessed IPV as a child, or if their partner uses alcohol. While controlling behavior is concerning on its own, it is also known to be a pre-cursor to physical and sexual violence.
Diva Dhar, Tarun Jain, and Seema Jayachandran (2022). “Reshaping Adolescents’ Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India.” American Economic Review, 112(3): 899–927
One of my (Bhumi) favorite papers was recently published in AER. Dhar, Jain and Jayachandran tested an intervention aimed at improving teenagers’ support of gender equality through 45-minute discussions every few weeks for an impressive 2.5 years. And it worked on improving their attitudes favoring gender equality by converting 16 percent of regressive attitudes. Moreover, these effects persisted after two years.
I won’t go into details as Marcus Goldstein already summarized the research when it was a working paper (so numbers are updated in this published version).
Susanne Schwarz and Alexander Coppock. 2022. “What Have We Learned about Gender from Candidate Choice Experiments? A Meta-Analysis of Sixty-Seven Factorial Survey Experiments.” The Journal of Politics.
I’ve (Annabelle) been looking forward to seeing Susanne Schwarz and Alex Coppock’s new paper out in print - it is a meta-analysis of the effect of gender in candidate choice experiments. The punch line? They find that survey respondents across many contexts and countries are, on average, 2 percentage points more likely to vote for a female candidate in a candidate choice experiment than a male candidate. I think this result might come as a surprise to some.
Semra Sevi. 2022. “Is Incumbency Advantage Gendered?” Legislative Studies Quarterly.
Semra Sevi has a new paper available online at Legislative Studies Quarterly that uses a regression discontinuity design to study whether the incumbency advantage is gendered in Canadian politics. In other words, Sevi compares male and female candidates that narrowly win or lose to figure out their likelihood of running again. Sevi finds that women incumbents are just as likely to run again in subsequent elections as men incumbents. But there is a catch - Sevi finds that women who barely lose an election are more likely to quit politics compared to men who barely lose an election.
Hargrave, L., & Blumenau, J. 2022. “No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK.” British Journal of Political Science.
Lotte Hargave and Jack Blumenau’s new paper uses text analysis techniques to analyze how male and female MPs speak and debate in UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019. They show that female MPs have increasingly adopted “masculine” stereotypes of communication. In other words, old stereotypes about women’s political communication may no longer apply.
António Valentim. 2022. “The political effects of female representation: Evidence from a regression-discontinuity design.” Working Paper.
This working paper uses a regression discontinuity design to study whether the election of a female candidate to the national legislature inspires more women to run in local elections in that district. Using data from English MP elections (this paper focuses on the UK but only data from England is included), this study finds that there is no effect of having a woman as an MP on the share of local female candidates. However, there appears to be a significant effect of electing a female MP on women’s internal political efficacy in the district.