Welcome to our two-month issue of the Gender & Politics Research Substack covering May & June 2022. It’s been a tough few weeks for women’s rights; we hope you’re holding on okay. If you find our newsletter helpful, please consider donating whatever you can to the National Network of Abortion Funds as a way to thank us: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fundabortionnow
As usual, the articles from U.S./Europe are summarized by Annabelle and the others by Bhumi. If you have an article you’d like us to feature, please reach out at bhumi.purohit@gmail.com.
Adams, James, David Bracken, Noam Gidron, Will Horne, Diana Z. O’Brien, and Kaitlin Senk. 2022. “Can’t We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics.” American Political Science Review, 1-7.
A new research paper by Adams et. al (2022) connects gender to the literature on partisan animosity and affective polarization. Using data from 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017, the authors show that women’s presence in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs.
The authors suggest that the “Women MPs Affective Bonus Hypothesis” is at work.
“The Women MPs Affective Bonus Hypothesis: All else being equal, partisans display warmer affect toward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs”
This finding is incredibly interesting and brings to mind the recent finding from Schwarz and Coppock (2022) which shows that voters generally prefer female candidates over male candidates in candidate choice experiments.
Similarly to other articles highlighted in this newsletter, the mechanisms driving the association between female legislators and less partisan animosity is less clear and is left for future work.
Butler, Daniel M., Elin Naurin, and Patrik Öhberg. 2022. "Constituents Ask Female Legislators to Do More." The Journal of Politics.
Butler, Naurin, and Patrik Öhberg (2022) conduct a field experiment in two electoral multi-member electoral districts in the United States and show that - yes - constituents ask female legislators to do more.
The setup is incredibly clear:
“For the experiment, we randomly assigned half of the constituents to be contacted by their female representative and half to be contacted by their male representative. We find that female legislators are 10% more likely to be contacted by constituents, and they receive 14% more issue requests per constituent they contact. This increase in workload requests of female legislators occurs on a wide range of issues.”
The authors clearly establish that female legislators are asked to do more by their constituents, but the mechanism behind this finding is less clear. Are female legislators more approachable than their male counterparts? Do constituents use different yardsticks to measure the performance of male and female legislators?
Lastly, as the authors note, this experiment was conducted at the state legislative level, where voters are likely to have little information about their legislators. I’m looking forward to future research that can help us better understand whether this pattern holds in different electoral settings.
Cheema, Ali, Sarah Khan, Asad Liaqat, and Shandana Khan Mohmand. 2022. “Canvassing the Gatekeepers: A Field Experiment to Increase Women Voters’ Turnout in Pakistan.” American Political Science Review, First View.
Where women’s political participation is severely limited by household gatekeepers, what works to improve their engagement? Cheema et al. conducted a field experiment in Lahore, Pakistan to test several interventions amongst 2,500 households in month leading up to the July 2018 election. The interventions consisted of unannounced ~20 minute visit by a non-partisan canvasser who encouraged women’s participation in the election; the various treatments and results are below:
T1: A female canvasser only spoke to women in the household
T2: A male canvasser only spoke to men in the household
T3: A male and female canvasser visited the same household separately and targeted both genders
T4: Control (no visit)
As the figure below from their article shows, speaking to women or men alone did not influence women’s turnout in the election at the 5% level (measured and verified as the presence of an ink mark on the woman’s thumb given during the election). Canvassing to both women and men within a household increased women’s electoral participation by 8 percentage points (significant at the 5% level).
The authors test various explanations using multiple specifications and find two plausible explanations for why the joint intervention works: men are more likely to help women reach the polling stations on election day, and the couple is more likely to discuss politics.
This is an important study that lends insights into how organizations can overcome gatekeeping barriers to women’s participation. As the authors note, the interventions only provide short-term solutions; they may not change the inherent dynamics within the household and may merely encourage one-time, low-cost participation. It’s also unclear how these findings would translate in settings where even an encouragement design may not be low cost. For instance, would it work in rural areas where travel costs to reach the voting booth are higher? Regardless, it’s an important addition to the literature on political participation and a great example of how to work with local organizations to enact research.
Daby, Mariela and Mason Moseley. 2022. “Feminist Mobilization and the Abortion Debate in Latin America: Lessons from Argentina.” Politics & Gender, 18: 359-393.
In March 2018, Argentina’s president came out in support of decriminalization of abortion, which surprised many given the country context—a Catholic population with center-right government. Daby and Moseley use in-depth interviews and multiple rounds of surveys to argue that the abortion debate in Argentina has emerged due to strengthening feminist mobilization (as opposed to changes in public opinion or religiosity). The article provides a great summary of the Ni Una Menos movement against gender violence, and argues that the movement’s social networks—particularly young women—partly helped fuel the abortion debate. They also attribute the success to Ni Una Menos’ framing of the issue as one of social justice that is interconnected to gender violence (as opposed to a rights-based framing). Given all that is happening in U.S. politics with the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortions, this is a helpful read to understand the issue in a different context.
Dancygier, Rafaela, Naoki Egami, Amaney Jamal, and Ramona Rischke. 2022. “Hate Crimes and Gender Imbalances: Fears over Mate Competition and Violence against Refugees”. American Journal of Political Science, 66(2): 501-515.
Dancygier et al. focus on a particular aspect of skewed gender ratios in migration: the fear it propagates amongst local men that migrant men will reduces their chances of mating with local women, and the subsequent hate crimes this fear propagates. This is a clearly difficult question to study given the many confounding variables that affect hate crimes and hate crimes are often underreported. The paper therefore uses a variety of approaches using data from Germany.
First, the authors show that in areas where there are more men than women, the predicted probability of hate crimes increases: “when moving from a municipality where men and women are evenly balanced to one where there are 120 men for every 100 women (corresponding to the 80th percentile of Excess Males), the probability of observing at least one hate crime rises by between 2.60 (95% CI = [0.88, 4.19]) and 1.71 points (95% CI = [0.76, 2.55]).”
Next, the authors implement an online panel survey of ~3000 individuals from Germany which was administered between September 2016-December 2017. Through the survey, they show that in areas where men have a disadvantage in mating markets, individuals are more likely to see refugees as mating threats. They also find this is more likely to be the case when respondents are men in the mating age range. Furthermore, respondents who perceive refugee men to mating competition are significantly more likely to condone violence as the only means to get attention of politicians, even when controlling for job competition or respondents’ life satisfaction.
This is a careful study that provides correlational support for the theory of mating competition and refugee violence using multiples sources of evidence, and the authors are careful to exclude empirical strategies that may pose ethical problems. Do read it for a closer look at the data.