RAPID: Political Party Organization and the Role of Women

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Women are under-represented in political parties in many new democracies, in part because of social norms that inhibit women from becoming active in local politics. What are the effects of reducing the gender gap in grassroots participation? This project addresses this question by conducting two large-scale surveys to evaluate the short- and long-run effects of a community civic education program designed to encourage women's political participation in Ghana. The civic education treatment takes the form of a series of large community meetings held by Ghana's National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), an independent, non-partisan government agency that regularly engages in similar activities, and addresses social norms against the participation of women in political parties and encourages greater women's participation. Assessing the link between civic education and levels of participation has implications for future development policy, including efforts funded and conducted by the US government.This research explores (a) whether women's political empowerment increases women's access to government resources and reduces their economic vulnerability, and (b) whether women's political empowerment changes attitudes and norms about women's appropriate roles in society. It extends an emerging body of work on these questions in two ways. First, most research on gender in the developing world has focused on the impacts of women in leadership positions. This study shifts focus to the study of the effects of grassroots participation. Second, endogeneity generally complicates causal inferences on the effects of women's participation. This research will be one of a handful of studies that have randomly encouraged or exploited "natural" experiments on women's participation. Moreover, the field experiment presents an unusually well-identified test of theories of how the resources available to political parties in new democracies affect their electoral strategies, including clientelism and intimidation of voters. The field experiment with an encouragement design allows the estimation of the effects of increased women's political participation on (a)political party strategies, including mobilization and outreach to women before the election; (b) the subsequent economic welfare of women; and (c) social norms about the participation of women in politics and local leadership.