Welcome to our two-month issue of the Gender & Politics Research Substack. We delayed March and combined it with April so we can cover the research presented at MPSA. We’re only covering the Global South this month but do look forward to full coverage next month! If you have an article you’d like featured, please reach out at bhumi.purohit@gmail.com.
Phillip, Shannon. 2022. Becoming Young Men in a New India Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony. Cambridge University Press. (Google preview available here).
Phillip’s book is an ethnographic account of men in urban India—Delhi, specifically—that provides a queer-feminist perspective on masculinity in the country. It examines the politics of being young men in India with an additional focus on class and sexuality, and critically assesses the impact these identities have on women’s experiences and safety. This book is a strong addition to the limited work on masculinity, especially in the Indian context, and promises to be equally entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Prices are a bit high for the book so request your library to purchase a copy if you don’t have research funds!
Ma, Anyi, Rosette, Ashleigh Shelby, and Christy Zhou Koval. 2022. Reconciling female agentic advantage and disadvantage with the CADDIS measure of agency. Journal of Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000550
Research in political psychology has been mixed on perceptions of agentic women. Agentic behavior refers to traits traditionally associated with men (e.g. assertive, dominant, confident). Women, on the other hand, are expected to be communal (e.g. helpful, kind, empathetic). Theories predict that women are rewarded for being communal, and punished when they defy stereotypes and are agentic—but evidence to date is mixed. Ma, Shelby, and Koval create a six-factor measure of agency and find that women have an agentic advantage when they are perceived to be competent, diligent, and independent. They have a disadvantage when they are perceived to be dominant. Note that respondents are recruited in the U.S. across 6 studies, so results may not hold everywhere.
Multiple authors. 2022. “She Rules! A symposium on the political representation of women in India.” Seminar Magazine, issue 752.
Researchers and activists from India contributed to this issue on political representation in India, edited by Rachel Brulé, Simon Chauchard, Alyssa Heinze, and Mekhala Krishnamurthy. This is a perfect non-academic read of recent research and work in India. The issue includes:
Gilles Verniers, Ishika Sharan, and Aishwarya Sunaad’s article on women’s participation in Indian elections
Mukulika Banerjee summarizes reasons that may explain women’s growing local participation
Rachel Brulé, Simon Chauchard, and Alyssa Heinze win the best title award for their article “Are husbands the problem?” Answer: yes but so are institutions
Bhumi Purohit (one of the ones writing this substack) analyzes how women’s professional networks vary once they are elected to local office
Soledad Artiz Prillaman summarizes research on why women’s representation matters, and areas for future research
Sonakshi Sharma discusses the representation of female politicians in Bollywood
Tara Krishnamurthy details some of the work undertaken by her citizen-led, volunteer group called Political Shakti, and the connections it has to state elections across India
Shirin Rai and Carole Spary discuss their jointly authored book which highlights the informal and formal exclusion of women in parliamentary politics
Akshi Chawla discusses the violence women face while running in political campaigns
Surili Sheth reviews two books: Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament by Shirin Rai and Carole Sprary (OUP, 2019) and Rachel Brulé’s Women, Power and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India (CUP, 2020)
Ummul Fayiza reviews the book Gendering Minorities: Muslim Women and the Politics of Modernity by Sherin B.S. (Orient Blackswan, 2021)
Tanika Sarkar reviews Aparna Vaidik’s Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries (CUP, 2021)
Dipankar Gupta reviews Bimal Prasad and Sujata Prasad’s The Dream of Revolution: A Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan (Penguin Random House, 2021)
Vishakha N. Desai, Shagun Sethi and Sandi Gendi summarize their interviews with women around the world on being empowered to enact change after the pandemic
Midwest Political Science Association Conference Summaries
This month, I compiled the papers on gender in the Global South from MPSA 2022. The summaries below are provided by the authors themselves. I did my best to include all the papers but if I missed yours, feel free to send me (Bhumi) an email; we will be sure to include you in the next newsletter.
This exercise also lent some insights into where gender & politics work is being done in the past year. While an abundance of work is coming out of Asia, relatively little is coming out of Sub-Saharan Africa, MENA, and Latin America.
South Asia (12 papers)
Tiffany Barnes, Jennifer Bussell, Nick Kuipers and Bhumi Purohit, “Gendered Representation in the Indian Administrative Service.” We document trends in the representation of women in the Indian Administrative Service over the last half-century. We find that while promotions and transfers aren’t prone to gender bias, women are much less likely to be promoted from state to central service. They are also more likely to be placed in “feminine” departments.
Soundarya Chidambaram, “Women's Cooptation into Grassroots Right-Wing Movements in Urban India.” This study uses intersectionality of gender and class to understand how the Hindu Right, espousing traditional gender roles, coopts women in urban slums by creating culturally appropriate spaces and offering alternative empowerment discourses.
Khushi Singh Rathore, “The Untapped Roots of Feminist Foreign Policy: Did the Early Indian Women Envoys Have a Blueprint?” Challenging feminist foreign policy as a phenomenon of the Global North, this paper argues to go back to the archives of anti-colonial movement to examine if the blueprint of FFP existed in the anti-imperial thought of early Indian women envoys.
Franziska Roscher, “Determinants of Female Electoral Participation in Developing Countries: Evidence from India.” When do women participate equally in the electoral process? Using a survey experiment around elections in India, I disaggregate individual-level and household-level factors that affect female turnout.
Nabaneeta Biswas, Christopher Cornwell, and Laura Zimmermann, “The Power of Lakshmi: Monetary Incentives for Raising a Girl.” We study whether a girl-child conditional cash transfer program in India can successfully improve the sex ratio as well as female post-birth outcomes.
Andy Andrew Harris and Rabia Malik, “A Booth of One's Own: Gender and Turnout in Pakistan.” How does gender segregation at the polling place shape political participation? Using a conjoint experiment, observational data, and interviews, we examine the effects of gender segregated polling stations on electoral participation.
Sarah Thompson and Natalya Rahman, “A Field Experiment to Improve Women’s Mobility in Pakistan.” How does increased mobility impact women’s political and labor force participation? We design a field experiment in urban Pakistan that randomizes access to motorbikes for women, measuring effects at the individual and household-level.
Soo Sun You, Cecilia H. Mo, Margaret Boittin, and Katrina Kosec. “Ceding Power in Intra-Household Bargaining in Times of Economic Anxiety: An Experimental Study in Nepal.” Using a survey experiment in Nepal, we examine how perceptions of one's relative economic status affect beliefs regarding gender roles.
Aditi Malik, “Mobilizing Public Protests against Sexual Violence in India.” Drawing on a comparative analysis of three gang rape incidents in 21st century India, this paper develops a new theory about the conditions under which ordinary citizens participate in public protests against sexual violence.
Alyssa Heinze, Shirin Abrishami Kashani, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman, “Gender, Education, and the Black Box of Descriptive Representation.” This paper studies how education shapes the link between descriptive and substantive representation.
Rachel Brulé, Simon Chauchard, and Alyssa Heinze, “Why Discussion Rules Matter for Representation: Experimental Evidence from Rural India.” This paper identifies how experimental variation in deliberative institutions' rules impacts gender inequalities in political voice.
Yasmeen Jahan and Aftab Alam, “Reimagining Intersectionality and Social Exclusion: A Critical Study on Lower Caste/Pasmanda Muslim Women in India.” This study explores the question of lower caste women among Indian Muslims and the issues of discriminations, social exclusion, economic exploitation, political marginalization, also the paradigms and debates around their lived experiences.
East and Southeast Asia (14 papers)
Nagyeong Kang, “Women’s Political Representation and Gender Quota Development in East Asia : Taiwan, South Korea, and Mongolia.” This paper compares the diverging quota systems of Taiwan, South Korea and Mongolia. It is a historical review of quota system's institutional development.
Yuko Kasuya, Hirofumi Miwa, and Yoshikuni Ono, “Why are there more women in the upper house?” In many bicameral legislatures, women's representation in the upper house tends to be higher than that in the lower house. Using the case of Japan, this paper explores the mechanisms behind this general pattern.
Shangzuo Chen, “Making the Regime Work for Women? Participations of Women Lawmakers inside an Illiberal Legislature.” Do women legislators represent women’s rights? My project deciphers the gender gap in the number of proposals from men and women lawmakers and whether there are as well gender differences in the policy proposals in illiberal legislature.
Yu Jeong Hwang and Tae Hyun Lim. “Gender, Partisanship, and Time: Candidates' Campaign Messaging in South Korea from 2000 to 2020.” We trace the effect of candidates' gender on their messaging by analyzing more than twenty thousand individual manifestos in South Korea from 2000 to 2020.
Yin Ru Chen. “The Institutional Analysis of Gender Mainstreaming: A Case Study in Taiwan.” This paper aims to analyze the designs of gender mainstreaming (GM) in Taiwan with an institutionalist perspective.
Eitan Paul, “Raising Representation? Gendered Dynamics of Village Budgeting Reforms in Indonesia.” This paper evaluates the effects of district regulations in Indonesia requiring separate community forums for women and other marginalized groups on the degree to which village development plans and budgets represent women’s preferences.
Cesi Cruz, Elayne Stecher, and Jiyoung Kim, “Removing Social Barriers to Women's Candidacy: A Field Experiment in Cambodia.” We test a new intervention in Cambodia to address social barriers to women's candidacy. We find that encouraging communities to identify women candidates led to an increase of 3.5 more female candidates on average in treatment areas.
Dong Yu and Yuehong Tai, “Gender and Language Proficiency in Court Legitimacy Building: Evidence from a Survey Experiment.” We investigate whether and how judges’ gender varies the effect of language on building audience’s trust in the court system by conducting a survey experiment in China.
Wen Cheng Lin and Wen-Chin Wu, “China’s Overseas Development Program and Women Empowerment in Africa.” In this article, we investigate whether the effects of foreign aid on improving women's empowerment would differ by donors’ regime types.
Hannah June Kim and Phoebe Moon, “The Growth of Gender Inequality During the Pandemic in South Korea.” This study examines how the pandemic has affected gender equality in South Korea. We find that government responses to Covid-19 and gendered attitudes have further widened the gender gap, leading to long term consequences beyond the pandemic.
Seo Nyeong Holly Jo, “Gender Matters in the Judiciary: Adjudicating Sexual Assault in Korea.” Using an original dataset of 700 judicial opinions and 42 interviews, my dissertation explores the interaction effect of judges' gender and relative rank in a collegial panel on sentence length of adult rape cases in Korea.
Chao Zhang and Yu Cheng, “The Forgotten Gendered Youth Activism Spaces: The Heterogeneous Action Strategies of Female Members in a Male-Dominated Online Community.” This article chose Hupu (虎扑), an online male-dominated sports community with strong hegemonic masculinity. We conceptualize young female's online activism in Hupu into four categories. What are their causes and action strategies?
Minju Lee, Chloe Minkyoung Kwak, and San Lee. “Unexpected Women’s Solidarity and Anti-Feminist Backlashes around ‘Fearless Girl’ and the ‘Comfort Women Statue’.” We argue that networks created between the agency of statues and human actors build women’s solidarity and anti-feminist backlashes, based on the Actor-Network-Theory. This paper analyzes diverse aspects of the dynamics of networks.
Tae Hyun Lim, “Crystalizing Beliefs and Public Opinion Change: Change in Gender Role Ideology in South Korea.” This paper tests how media interacts with public opinion before and after the preferences have crystalized using gender role ideology change in South Korea as its case.
Latin America (8 papers)
Miranda Jones, “Does Quota Strength Affect Values on Gender Equality?” I conduct a difference-in-differences estimation to understand whether quota strength affects the values held by individuals in Argentina and Brazil on issues of women's political power, personal choice, and ambition.
Daniela Osorio Michel, “The Role of Gendered Expectations on the Electability of Women Candidates.” Do varying levels of gendered expectation affect the punishment degree women candidates face? In Latin America, individuals with higher expectations of women tend to dislike more and have lower probabilities of voting for corrupt or ineffective women.
Angela Maria Bohorquez Oviedo, “Disseminating Disinformation for Promoting Peace? The Campaign against ‘Gender Ideology’ in the Colombian Peace Plebiscite.” Before the Colombian plebiscite elections, influential right-wing leaders created a hybrid communication network with disinformation and meanings about gender to derail public gender equality initiatives in the final peace agreement.
Diego José Romero, Livia Isabella Schubiger, and David Dow. “Trust and Public Institutions: Reporting of Gender-Based Violence in Guatemala.” In this paper, we address whether criminal justice reforms can increase the reporting of gender-based violence. We focus on Guatemala and study the effect of the territorial expansion of the Ministerio Publico (General Attorney's office).
Mariela Szwarcberg Daby, “Femicides in Latin America: When Numbers are Political.” How and why did femicides become the most visible and vital social movement in the region? This paper traces the NiUnaMenos (Not one [woman] less) movement to understand feminist mobilizations to stop violence against women in Latin America.
McKenzie Griffeth, “Latin American Bureaucrats and their Gender-Based Differences in Perspective.” Using data gathered through the process of communicating with Latin American Bureaucrats, I have analyzed how significantly the gender of a bureaucrat can affect their response.
Gustavo Diaz, Virginia Oliveros, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, and Matthew Winters, “Gender and Credit Claiming: Are There Different Standards for Male and Female Politicians?” Do citizens’ reactions to credit claiming vary with the gender of the politician involved? We use survey experimental evidence from Argentina to investigate this question.
Diana Orces, Abby Cordova, Jonathan Hiskey, and Mary Fran Malone, “#NosEstanMatando: Understanding Women’s International Migration from Central America.” This paper seeks to understand the mechanisms that explain Central American women’s vulnerability to gender-based violence and how it affects their decision to migrate.
Middle East & North Africa (6 papers)
Mohammad Amjad, “Feminism in the Muslim World.” This paper aims to reflect on how feminists in Muslim World are trying to bypass the cultural and religious restrictions and soothe the fear of secularism and address the major challenges women face .
Fahima Amini, “Afghan Women Judges and the Failure of Rule of Law Reforms.” This paper examines the rule of law reform and its impact on women’s access to justice, as well as the role of Afghan women judges in this process within the twenty years of effort made by the Afghan government and international community.
Patricia Charlotte Rodda and Megan Stippich, “Co-Optation, Competition, and Culture: The Path to Women’s Rights in Morocco.” This project evaluates the institutional forces that led to the legal recognition of women’s rights in Morocco, especially as it relates to family law, and how those same forces have influenced the implementation of these changes.
Ilkim Buke Okyar and Aylin Aydin Cakir, “Legal Mobilization and Civil Society in Authoritarian States: Women’s Rights Organizations in Turkey.” By focusing on violence against women and using comparative analysis, this paper seeks to understand the efficiency of legal mobilization efforts of civil society organizations under authoritarian regimes with a focus on Turkey.
Shamiran Mako and Mahesh Karra, “Exploring the Effect of the Iraq War on Women’s Health Care Seeking Behavior and Well-Being.” We examine the impact of the Iraq war on women’s health care seeking behavior. Using cross-sectional micro-data, we exploit variation in the intensity of violence across Iraqi provinces to estimate the impact of the war on women’s well-being.
Farzin Shargh , “Iranian Women's Movement: A Silent Protest for More Rights in a Repressive Context.” Women in Iran have been able to regain many of their rights while the governing regime continues to hold a strict patriarchal tone. This paper looks at explanations that political science and feminist scholarship provide for this phenomenon.
Sub-Saharan Africa (4 papers)
Mercy Kaburu and Carolyn Logan, “Gender Equity and Political Leadership in Kenya: The Two-Thirds Gender Rule in Perspective.” Women are underrepresented in political leadership in Kenya. The paper examines the institutional and societal challenges and opportunities of realizing the constitutional two-thirds gender rule towards gender equity in Kenya’s political leadership.
Sophie Brown, “The Necessity of Gender Analysis in Scholarship on Africa.” Gender analysis on any subject forces scholars to denaturalise our gendered reality. Within the context of Africa, it often forces scholars to reassess their own positionality in regards to studying Africa thus promoting more robust scholarship.
Liz McGuire, “Do Western Researchers Affect How We Observe Gender Dynamics in the Field? An Experimental Study.” A focus group experiment in rural Tanzania measured the effect of the presence of a white researcher. Groups that had a white (female) researcher present in the focus group team talked longer, especially on topics of gender and traditional culture.
Adryan Wallace, “Reflecting Multiple Interests: Gender Equality and Regional Economic Agreements in Africa.” This paper examines the ways in which the policies adopted by regional economic communities (RECs) results in a more descriptive representation of women’s interests rather than a substantive one featuring multiple sets of economic agendas.
Cross-Country (or country not clear) (19 papers)
Darren Hawkins and Jay Goodliffe, “What accounts for international patterns of state adoption of legislative gender quotas?” We find robust evidence that trade networks are strongly associated with the adoption of regular and effective legislative gender quotas.
Kostanca Dhima, “The Gender Continuum? Femininity, Masculinity, and Vote Choice in a Comparative Perspective.” When candidates deviate from gendered norms, does it influence voters? I conduct the first cross-national conjoint experiment to examine how a candidate’s expressed level of femininity/masculinity affects their electability.
Danielle Higgins, “The Adoption of Paid Paternity and Gender-Neutral Leave in Comparative Perspective.” This paper is a large N analysis of the adoption of paid paternity and paid gender-neutral leave policies around the world from 1995 to 2015, extending previous analyses of the adoption of maternity and childcare leave policies.
Claudine Nkeze Ngulefeh Nkeze, “Gender Equality and Climate Change in the Global South.” There is increasing recognition of the importance of equal gender participation in the development and implementation of gender-responsive national and international climate policies leveraging from local experiences and organizations.
Hatti Sellers and Jeong Hyun Kim, “Women's Security Presence and Gender Norms in Post-Conflict Societies.” We argue that women's involvement in the security area may facilitate a more positive image of women in post-conflict politics. Using survey data, we analyze whether attitudes toward women are changed due to female involvement in conflict and peace.
Byung-Deuk Woo, Lindsey Goldberg, and Frederick Solt. “Public Gender Egalitarianism: A Dataset of Dynamic Comparative Public Opinion Toward Egalitarian Gender Roles in the Public Sphere.” Attitudes toward gender roles play a central part in theorizing on the difficulty women face in achieving political equality. We present comparable estimates of the public attitudes on gender equality across more than one hundred countries over time.
Willow Kreutzer and Carly Millerd, “Disaster, Destruction, and the Decline of Women’s Economic Freedom.” This article examines fast onset disasters and their impact on women's economic empowerment. We analyze the long term effects women suffer from natural disasters in developing countries.
Jennifer Dumas, “Structural Violence and Terrorism Tactics: Gender Inequality and the Utilization of Indiscriminate Violence.” I expect that terrorist organizations arising from gender unequal environments are more likely to use sexual and gender-based violence, utilize women to carry out fatal attacks, and target children and other vulnerable populations in attacks.
Masako Rachel Okura, “Gendering Sports and Defamation: A Comparative Analysis of Social Media Abuse of Female Athletes in Japan and the U.S.” This comparative study of Japan and the U.S. centers on female Olympic athletes and social media abuse during the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021. Additionally, respective plans of action (e.g., by sports associations, governments) will be evaluated.
Gustavo Venturelli and Pedro Dos Santos, “Tweeters in Chief: Populism, Masculinity, and the Tweets of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro .” This paper compares the tweets of Donald Trump (@POTUS45) and Jair Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro), focusing on how their messages promote populist messages and masculine themes.
Esther Afrakoma Appiah Dwaah, “Yes, My Career Would End: How the Existence of Illicit Digital Media May Inhibit Women from participating in Politics.” As technology advances and digital political spaces expand, there remains the need for continuous scholarly contribution on how technology may be employed as a tool to impede women’s political recruitment and representation.
Perisa Davutoglu, “Tit-for-tat? Examining the Impact of Conflict Issue on Sexual Violence.” This study explores the relationship between the main conflict issue and conflict-related sexual violence.
Heidi Marie Stallman, “Women Also Fight: Gendered Orders In Ungoverned Spaces.” This paper interrogates the themes of protectionism applied to women’s roles in conflict. Specifically, I look at variables which impact the provision of gendered orders in insurgent controlled spaces.
Qin Huang, “Gender Differences and Inequalities in Political Participation: An Empirical Approach Combining Machine Learning and QCA.” This article studies gender differences and inequalities in political participation by combing XGBoost and QCA. It identifies four explanatory important factors. It also investigates whether these factors have different influences across gender.
Kostanca Dhima , “Women’s Legislative Representation: Supply, Mass and Elite Demand, and Regime Type.” I evaluate how supply, mass demand, and elite demand explain the variation in women’s legislative representation in democracies and dictatorships.
Alper Tolga Bulut and Tevfik Murat Yildirim, “Unveiling the Support for Female Representation in Muslim-Majority Countries: An Intersectional Approach.” Drawing on an original face-to-face survey with over 2,700 respondents, we examine gender's interaction with social cleavages in determining support for women's increased representation in parliament.
Aaron Childree and Douglas Lee Kriner, “The Gender Gap in Prospective and Retrospective Evaluations of the Use of Force.” Using public polling conducted during the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we examine the influence of gender and party affiliation on both prospective and retrospective evaluations of the use of force.
Mattias Ottervik and Zheng Su, “Gender Inequality and Conflict: Patriarchy as a Predictor of Political Violence.” This study tests the individual-level link between acceptance of patriarchy and acceptance of political violence. The results provide individual-level support for the country-level research that shows a link between gender inequality and conflict.
Enrique López Rodriguez, “Where Are the Women? Gender-Based Violence as a Determinant of Participation of Women’s Involvement in Peacekeeping.” This article outlines how the continuum of violence in women’s lives is a determinant for their participation in armed and peacekeeping forces.