Autocratic Liberalization and Gendered Speech: Evidence from the Parliament of Singapore

W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 5-2020 Autocratic Liberalization and Gendered Speech: Evidence from the Parliament of Singapore Elizabeth Rosen Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the International Relations Commons Recommended Citation Rosen, Elizabeth, "Autocratic Liberalization and Gendered Speech: Evidence from the Parliament of Singapore" (2020). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 1452. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/1452 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Autocratic Liberalization and Gendered Speech: Evidence from the Parliament of Singapore A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from The College of William and Mary by Elizabeth Rosen Accepted for ________Honors_____________________ (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors) _S.P. Harish, 930963292____________________ Type in the name, Director __Fiona Shen-Bayh__________________________ Type in the name __Claire McKinney____________________________ Type in the name Williamsburg, VA May 1, 2020 Rosen 1 Abstract Gender differences in political behavior are well documented in democracies, but poorly understood in the context of liberalizing autocracies. In Singapore, the ruling party experienced both an internal and external reform over the course of five years. This paper uses natural language processing to analyze the impact of these two changes on parliamentary debates delivered by elected male and female politicians from the ruling party. The internal reform, a non- binding party gender quota, activates identities that differ within the party, namely gender identity. In contrast, the external reform, the opposition’s electoral victory, activates a unifying identity of party affiliation. Structural topic model evidence shows that the two types of shocks have different impacts on the use of gendered rhetoric and prevalence of gendered topics in political speech. Most importantly, men have much stronger responses to both shocks than women, due to differences in experience and risk aversion. This paper advances the literature on gender and authoritarianism and provides policy-relevant information on the impact of liberalizing reforms. Keywords: Autocratic liberalization, gender, political speech, Singapore Rosen 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................................3 Section 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................................4 Section 2: Literature Review ..........................................................................................................6 Section 3: Methodology ................................................................................................................22 Section 4: Results ..........................................................................................................................31 Section 5: Discussion ....................................................................................................................44 Section 6: Conclusion ....................................................................................................................54 Appendix A: SearchK diagnostics ................................................................................................57 Appendix B: Additional stop words ..............................................................................................59 Appendix C: Structural topic model summaries ............................................................................60 Appendix D: Reform effects with 90% confidence ......................................................................63 Appendix E: Reform effects, controlling for seat type .................................................................65 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................67 Rosen 3 Acknowledgements This thesis would not be complete without the help of many, many people. First, Professor S.P. Harish, my honors advisor and mentor. I cannot count how many panicked emails I have sent you. Thanks for always having an answer… and reminding me to calm down. Being your student taught me to think like a social scientist and working with you has been absolutely delightful. I’d also like to thank my panelists, Professor Claire McKinney and Professor Fiona Shen-Bayh, for patiently listening to and improving my ideas and introducing me to aspects of gender studies and data science I had never seen before. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Sutterlin, for being the best editor I can imagine for the last two years, and to Thomas Liu, for helping with the data collection and cleaning. I also benefitted from the assistance of the Government Department, which funded my attendance at the Southern Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting in January 2020 so that this thesis could receive valuable critique. Attending William & Mary is such a privilege because the professors are both knowledgeable and caring, and I am thankful to all my past professors for shaping my academic development. I would not have made it through this process without my friends and family—thank you all for being such uplifting, loving, and joyous presences in my life and bearing with me when I whine about spreadsheets. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge what a gift this experience has been. I feel very lucky to have the chance to pursue knowledge and share it with the world. Thanks for reading. Rosen 4 1 Introduction How do liberalizations in autocracies change the way male and female politicians speak? Previous studies of political speech have found that men and women often discuss different subjects— women are more likely to talk about women’s issues, such as women’s rights and education, and men are more likely to talk about masculine-coded issues, like defense and foreign policy. When autocracies liberalize, these baseline differences in political speech can shift as politicians interpret their changing political environment. Internal reforms initiated by the incumbent party send a different message to politicians than external reforms that are imposed by outside forces, such as opposition movements. Singapore offers the chance to examine how liberalization impacts political speech because between during a five-year period, the ruling party experienced both an internal and an external reform shock. Structural topic modeling, a natural language processing method that pulls themes out of large bodies of text, shows that these policies affected male and female politicians differently. Applying structural topic models to the record of parliamentary debates before and after the policy changes addresses the question of how reforms in autocracies change the way that male and female politicians speak. This paper addresses gaps in the literature on gender in autocracies. Most studies of gender and politics focus heavily on gendered policy outcomes in democracies, such as men and women voting differently on budgets or war. Autocracies and hybrid regimes make up a large share of the world’s states and deserve greater attention.1 However, these states should not be studied in the 1 According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, only 22 countries were considered full democracies in 2019. That leaves 145 states classified as flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, or authoritarian regimes. “Global Democracy Has Another Bad Year,” The Economist Newspaper Limited, January 22, 2020, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/01/22/global-democracy-has-another-bad-year Rosen 5 same way as democracies. After the Cold War, states around the world were under duress to adopt hallmarks of democracy. As a result, many states have taken up elections and representation quotas without a corresponding increase in the quality of democracy. In authoritarian regimes, pressure to achieve party priorities and project unity limit variation in how ruling party politicians vote on issues such as budgets or war. Political speech, on the other hand, has far more variation and expresses greater nuance. Using parliamentary debates, this paper addresses the issue that in non- democracies, policy outcomes are less representative of politicians’ views than measures like political speech. In addition to addressing an understudied type of regime and underutilized outcome variable, this paper has implications for policies that promote democracy and gender equality in hybrid and autocratic regimes. International gender equality movements dedicate massive amounts of time, money, and effort to secure women’s rights. Many of the results that these organizations are hoping for are democratic in nature—UN Women, for instance, works to elect more women by sponsoring programs that train women as political candidates and encouraging states to adopt gender quotas.2 If these policies have no impact on politics or worsen gender divides, organizations’ hard work has the opposite of the desired effect. Studying

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