Annabelle is on the market this year, so this newsletter is by me (Bhumi) and largely focuses on non-U.S. and non-European papers, with a couple of exceptions. Thank you for reading this substack; it keeps me motivated to keep up with the literature and deep dive into the inspiring work on gender out there.
As always, if you have an article you’d like us to feature in the next newsletter, please reach out at bhumi.purohit@gmail.com.
In related opportunities, the Gender and Political Participation (GPP) Working Group is kicking off their Spring 2023 workshop series. GPP is a space for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to present their work and engage with other graduate students. The seminar series will consist of bi-weekly presentations over Zoom. Here's a link to join their mailing list and/ or participate in the seminar series: https://forms.gle/kPBntpzxGNiDaKiaA The deadline to fill out the form is 15th December 2022.
Allam, Nermin. "Women’s Unveiling in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising: Political Opportunities and Modesty Politics." Politics & Gender (2022): 1-22.
Shortly after the 2011 Egyptian uprising, why did a large number of women chose to unveil rather than continue wearing the hijab? Allam contributes to the growing literature that merges the personal with the political by expanding on three causes: changes in political opportunities, changes in the framing of unveiling, and exposure to new social and political networks. These conclusions stem from 17 interviews in 2020 with women, all with college degrees, who took off the veil shortly after the uprising. Notably, 12 of these women had no history of political activism prior to the uprising. The findings are as follows:
Changes in political opportunities: during the uprising, the army justified violence against women protestors by invoking gendered moral notions of their roles. These politicized moments spurred a larger debate in society on modesty politics, and what women should and shouldn’t do. These enforced patriarchal notions compelled some women to unveil as a challenge to imposed rules.
New framing of unveiling: after the uprising, unveiling became a symbol of public defiance against politicized Islamist ideologies. As Allam puts its, “It was not the presence of the hijab as much as its absence that came to signify rejection of Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi style of Islamism in Egypt.”
Exposure to new networks: the uprising, and women’s participation during the event, expanded women’s networks through which they were exposed to new ideas of modesty and the meaning of hijab. These networks both influenced their decisions and the relationships or conversations they had with their family. As one of the interviewees said, “I told him [my father], so you want me to believe that you are worried about carrying my sins for removing the veil, but you are not carrying your son’s sins for sleeping around. And you know I just said I am not asking you for your religious blessing, I am asking that you respect my choice.”
Overall, Allam’s article offers rich revelations on how contentious politics intersect with personal choices, and the lasting effects of political participation.
Dehdari, Sirus H., Karl-Oskar Lindgren, Sven Oskarsson, and Kåre Vernby. 2022. "The Ex-Factor: Examining the Gendered Effect of Divorce on Voter Turnout." American Political Science Review.
Do marital disruptions influence voter turnout? This amazingly-titled article examines the causal impact of divorces on voter turnout using Swedish population data and voter turnout data from the 1994, 2010, and 2018 general elections—totaling a whopping 1.2 million unique individuals who experience divorce during the time period. Of note, the paper highlight gendered differences in turnout following divorces amongst heterosexual couples. Theoretically, the results could go two ways. As Dehdari et al. highlight, women experience greater downturn in their economic wellbeing after a divorce, so we may anticipate that women’s turnout following the event might be larger than men’s. Alternatively, spousal mobilization theories suggest that married individuals are more likely to vote than unmarried ones when partners influence each other. In countries where women’s turnout is greater than men’s, divorces may lead to lower turnout rates amongst men who are less likely to be “mobilized” by their female partners to go vote.
As seen in the graph, voting rates amongst married and different-sex couples are similar before divorces. Using a linear regression with couple fixed effects, the findings are as follows: “If we compare turnout in the year of the divorce to turnout three years prior to the divorce, the drop in turnout is about 7.5 percentage points for women and slightly above 8 percentage points for men. As time passes, the turnout rates gradually start to increase again, but the recovery is faster for women than for men. Seven years after the divorce, women are about 3 percentage points less likely to vote than they were as married, whereas the corresponding figure for men is about 5.5 percentage points.”
Why the gendered patterns? A mechanism check finds greater support for the spousal mobilization theory. Because women are more likely to vote than men in Sweden more generally, women are more likely to be the mobilizer for men to go vote after marriage.
Hankla, Charles, Sayan Banerjee, Anjali Thomas, and Arindam Banerjee. 2022. "Electing Women in Ethnically Divided Societies: Candidates, Campaigns, and Intersectionality in Bihar, India." Comparative Political Studies.
What factors influence women’s political success in ethnically divided societies? Within this broader question, Kankla et al. explore three related question in the state of Bihar, India through a survey experiment amongst 1600 respondents and interviews. These questions, along with their findings, are below:
How do intersecting identities of caste/ethnicity and gender between both women candidates and voters influence vote choice? They find that “women voters prefer women candidates, and that Scheduled Caste and Muslim voters also prefer candidates from their in-groups”. They additionally find that Muslim women in particular are at a disadvantage; both women and men respondents in the conjoint are unlikely to support them as candidates.
How do campaign appeals influence vote choice, e.g. do voters prefer women who foreground policies that are more stereotypically “female”? They find that “women voters favor candidates who make security appeals more than do men, and that they especially favor women candidates who make security appeals”.
Are voters who are more exposed to caste discrimination less likely to vote for women? They find that “personal experience with caste discrimination increases rather than decreases support for women candidates”.
Overall, this study is well-aligned with the results from the meta-analysis on gender conjoints by Schwarz and Coppack (2022) which finds a general advantage for women candidates.
Hartman, Alexandra C., Sarah Khan, Milli Lake, Sabrina Karim, Ali Cheema, Asad Liaqat, and Shandana Khan Mohmand. 2022. "Field Experiments on Gender: Where the Personal and Political Collide." PS: Political Science & Politics: 1-5.
It’s hard to summarize this piece as it raises a number of important reflection points for scholars who study gender norms through field experiments. For instance, Hartman et al. note that we, as researchers, often go in with our own normative judgements on gender in other communities and inevitably end up changing power dynamics through interventions. How should we contend with the changes these experiments may cause, such as intimate partner violence if women’s political participation increases? This is an important piece to read and reflect on for anyone conducting fieldwork, or leading a team doing so.
Hutchinson, Annabelle, Sarah Khan, and Hilary Matfess. 2022. "Childcare, Work, and Household Labor During a Pandemic: Evidence on Parents’ Preferences in the United States." Journal of Experimental Political Science: 1-19.
How did working parents (in heterosexual relationships) deal with the increased burden of childcare and household needs during the pandemic? To answer this question, Hutchinson (of this substack fame) et al. relied on an online conjoint experiment of ~2000 parents aged 18–45 with at least one child under 12 in the U.S. in August 2020. They find that both men and women in their sample prefer childcare over its absence, and that there isn’t a significant gender gap in their preferences for its availability - surprising given women disproportionately bear the burden of childcare in the country. Additionally, both women and men find more utility in the husband’s earning than the wife’s, and wives are more sensitive to the husband’s unemployment than the husband himself. Lastly, they examine how women and men value sharing housework, including “feminine” tasks such as cooking and cleaning. While both genders prefer sharing equal time on these tasks, women’s preference for men’s contribution towards housework is higher than men’s. These differences, however, vary by how respondents score on a sexism scale, with those scoring higher having greater preferences for women’s contribution to household tasks and lesser preferences for men’s contribution to feminine tasks.
For those familiar with reading conjoint results, the AMCE by gender of the respondent are below. In the first graph, the outcome is if they prefer the variable in the row by the gender in the column. The second graph evaluates which profile they think is more fair.
While we don’t know what these preferences would be outside of the pandemic (see Valerino et al. 2017 and Knoster and Li 2022 for general preferences on parental leave), these results are salient given the ongoing policy discussions on childcare policy in the U.S. (see the latest here).
For another piece on a similar topic, see Mala Htun’s 2022 piece in Perspectives in Politics.
Mechkova, Valeriya, Sirianne Dahlum, and Constanza Sanhueza Petrarca. "Women's political representation, good governance and human development." Governance (2022).
Does descriptive representation of women change development outcomes in settings with poor governance? Mechkova and Sirianne study corruption as one indicator of governance and find that in countries with low levels of corruption, there is a negative correlation between women’s political empowerment and infant death (their measure of governance). When corruption is high, inclusion of women is associated with worse infant mortality rates. They suggest one possibility: when women politicians are recruited from the networks of corrupt male political affiliates, development outcomes either decrease or remain the same because these women are incentivized to maintain corruption. The authors measure corruption using V-Dem data from 1900-2020, with corresponding data on infant mortality rates from 1900–2014 as the dependent variable. Their measure of women’s political empowerment is also from V-Dem. The limitations of such data withstanding, the paper poses an important question that could potentially be answered through more local datasets exploiting sub-regional variation.
When combined with findings from Chaudhuri et al. 2022’s AJPS article (one of my favorites of the year), it also poses an important question: do women learn how to engage in corruption the longer they stay in office as Chaudhuri et al. find? If so, women’s entry into politics in corrupt countries may only lead to positive development outcomes in the short-term, but we may see this effect attenuate. Overall, this is a good piece for further thought.
Wilke, Anna. Forthcoming. “Gender Gaps in Support for Vigilante Violence.” Comparative Politics.
Anyone who keeps up with news in South Asia or parts of sub-Saharan Africa knows that vigilante violence is a big concern, especially when combined with information spread on social media. Wilke notes, however, that data from the Afrobarometer shows large gender gaps in support for vigilantism: compared to men, women are over two percentage points (<0.01) more likely to report that they would turn to mob vigilantism if they were a victim of crime.
Wilke examines this question by turning to two studies: a 2017 survey experiment amongst 1,956 respondents in rural Uganda, and two surveys from 2019 and 2021 in Tanzania. The Uganda study suggests that men are more likely to think that mob vigilantism may be directed towards someone who is wrongfully accused in their community than women do. Since the survey experiment is other-facing, the Tanzania study probes into personal experiences with vigilantism. The findings show that 71% of male respondents believed they might be likely to be falsely attacked for a crime, whereas 48% of female respondents held these beliefs. These beliefs about their personal propensity to be caught up in vigilantism may make men more averse to it. Wilke also does a great job of showing that women’s distrust of the police, their desire for stronger punishment, or their desire for greater due process are not predictive of their attitudes towards more vigilantism. This is a great study to start thinking about how to reduce not only women’s, but men’s support for vigilantism.