Direct Democracy and Women’s Political Engagement
Jeong Hyun Kim Louisiana State University
Abstract: What are the conditions that promote gender equality in political participation? In this article, I propose that the presence of direct democracy expands gender equality in political participation by signaling the system’s openness to women’s voice, confirming their political competency, and highlighting their stake in political decisions. To test this argument, I leverage a quasi-experiment in Sweden in the aftermath of the introduction of universal suffrage, where the type of municipal political institutions was determined by a population threshold. My findings lend strong support to the effect of direct democracy on the political inclusion of women. I find that the gender gap in electoral participation was smaller in municipalities using direct democracy than in similarly sized municipalities that only had representative institutions.
Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this arti- cle are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https:/doi.org/10.7910/AGIMGY.
cross the world, women’s engagement in poli- the political environment affects gendered patterns tics tends to lag behind that of men. Although of political behavior. Recently, the historical political A the gender gap in turnout has disappeared in economy literature has drawn attention to the role of many countries (Inglehart and Norris 2000; Quaranta institutional context by investigating how proportional and Dotti Sani 2018; Smets and Van Ham 2013), re- representation (Skorge 2018a) and heightened party search demonstrates that women still participate less fre- competition (Corder and Wolbrecht 2016) have increased quently in other forms of political activities, such as mak- women’s turnout relative to men’s in the early twentieth ing campaign contributions, joining a political organi- century. zation, or persuading others to vote (Burrell 2004; De- This article illuminates an alternative institutional sposato and Norrander 2009; Fraile and Gomez 2017; mechanism that narrows the gender gap in participation: Inglehart and Norris 2003). Women’s lower propensity direct democracy. In broader terms, direct democracy to engage in politics raises normative concerns, and refers to political processes that allow ordinary citizens it has important policy consequences. Given that men to directly decide on laws rather than select representa- and women tend to hold divergent political preferences tives to make decisions on their behalf (Matsusaka 2005). (Alvarez and McCaffery 2003; Gottlieb, Grossman, and The most widespread forms of direct democracy include Robinson 2016), lower levels of political participation citizen initiatives, in which citizens vote on fellow citi- among women can produce policies that are systemati- zens’ policy proposals, and referendums, in which citi- cally biased against women’s preferences, which in turn zens vote on a law already approved by the legislature. can reinforce gender inequalities in social and economic Direct democracy also covers town meetings, in which domains. citizens gather on a regular basis for making public de- While scholars have examined the effect of cultural cisions. In several advanced democracies, most famously (Inglehart and Norris 2000) and economic factors in the United States and Switzerland, direct democratic (Morgan-Collins and Teele 2017) on women’s political procedures have become an integral part of the policy- participation, there has been less discussion on how making process across different levels of government.
Jeong Hyun Kim is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70802 ([email protected]). I would like to thank the Editor of AJPS and three anonymous reviewers, as well as Deniz Aksoy, Michael Bechtel, Dan Butler, Melody Crowder-Meyer, Olle Folke, Matt Gabel, Johanna Rickne, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer, Margit Tavits, Dawn Teele,and Danielle Thomsen for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. I also thank Karin Leijon for her crucial help with identifying Swedish documents. I acknowledge the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for support for this research. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 00, xxxx 2019, Pp. 1–17