https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5443-8356
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ABSTRACT
Why do some countries have fewer women in parliament than do others? Recent studies find that women have less access to positions of political power in countries facing external threats. Existing studies, however, do not differentiate between types of threat. We theorize that territorial threats are a particular driver of gender inequality in national parliaments. When a country’s land is under threat, people prefer having “tough” representatives in the national legislature who are competent on the military and defence more so than when a country faces other threats. Moreover, when countries face territorial threats, they build larger standing armies and adopt military conscription, raising the level of militarization in society, which negatively influences women’s access to the national legislature. Using a time-series cross-sectional data set of 101 democracies, we find that countries facing external territorial threats have lower percentages of women in parliament compared to countries facing other or no external threats. Additionally, we find that countries with higher levels of militarization have fewer women in the national legislature.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Alice J. Kang http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5443-8356
Nam Kyu Kim http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0621-4192
Notes
1 Adams, “Liberia’s Election”; Helms, “Women as Agents”; Hughes, “Armed Conflict, International Linkages”; Hughes and Tripp, “Civil War and Trajectories of Change”; Tripp, Women and Power in Post-Conflict Africa; Webster et al., “Conflict, Peace, and the Evolution.”
2 Schroeder, “When Security Dominates the Agenda”; see also Barnes and O’Brien, “Defending the Realm.”
3 Gibler, The Territorial Peace; Huth, Standing Your Ground; Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited.
4 Gibler, The Territorial Peace; Kim, “External Territorial Threats.”
5 Barnes and O’Brien, “Defending the Realm”; Schroeder, “When Security Dominates the Agenda.”
6 Gibler et al., “Individual Identity Attachments”; Hutchison and Gibler, “Political Tolerance and Territorial Threat”; Tir and Bailey, “Painting Too ‘Rosie’ a Picture.”
7 Colaresi et al., Strategic Rivalries in World Politics.
8 Ibid; Goertz et al., The Puzzle of Peace; Thies, “War, Rivalry, and State Building.”
9 Goertz et al., The Puzzle of Peace.
10 Huth, Standing Your Ground.
11 Johnson and Toft, “Grounds for War.”
12 Smith, “The Origins of Nations.”
13 Gibler, The Territorial Peace, 26.
14 Hensel, “Contentious Issues and World Politics”; Senese, “Geographical Proximity and Issue Salience.”
15 Hensel, “Contentious Issues and World Politics,” 85.
16 Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited.
17 Miller, “Individual-Level Expectations.”
18 Thies, “War, Rivalry, and State Building”; Tilly, “War Making and State Making.”
19 Gibler, The Territorial Peace, 77–80.
20 Kim, “External Territorial Threats.”
21 Asal et al. “I Want You!”
22 White, “Crises and Crisis Generations.”
23 Kim, “External Territorial Threats.”
24 Thies, “Territorial Nationalism.”
25 Fair, Fighting to the End.
26 Loveman, “Historical Foundations.”
27 The authors theorize in greater depth about and test the relationship between external threats and negative attitudes toward female leaders in a separate paper that is under review.
28 Huddy and Terkildsen, “Gender Stereotypes and the Perception”; Kahn, The Political Consequences of Being; Sapiro, “If U.S. Senator Baker were a Woman.”
29 Falk and Kenski, “Issue Saliency and Gender Stereotypes”; Holman et al., “Sex, Stereotypes, and Security”; Lawless, “Women, War, and Winning Elections.”
30 Enloe, Maneuvers, 3.
31 Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited.
32 Goertz et al., The Puzzle of Peace, 30.
33 Gibler, The Territorial Peace.
34 Huddy and Terkildsen, “Gender Stereotypes and the Perception”; Kahn, The Political Consequences of Being.
35 Enloe, Maneuvers, 6.
36 Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 52.
37 Cockburn, The Line, 113.
38 A list of countries in the sample is presented in Table A3 of the Supporting Appendix.
39 Jacob et al., “Gender Norms”; Krook and True, “Rethinking the Life Cycles”; Paxton et al., “The International Women’s Movement.”
40 Skanning et al., “A Lexical Index.”
41 Coppedge et al., V-Dem.
42 Colaresi et al., Strategic Rivalries, 28–71; Thompson and Dreyer, Handbook of International Rivalries.
43 Colaresi et al., Strategic Rivalries, 13.
44 Palmer et al., “The MID4 Dataset.”
45 Alternatively, we count the number of each type of MID in the past 5 years; results remain similar.
46 Toronto, “Military Recruitment Data Set.”
47 Matland and Studlar, “The Contagion of Women Candidates.”
48 Bormann and Golder, “Democratic Electoral Systems.”
49 Cole, “Government Respect.”
50 Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946-2001.”
51 Hughes and Tripp, “Civil War and Trajectories of Change.”
52 Kreutz, “How and When Armed Conflicts.”
53 Jones, “Increasing Women’s Representation”; Tripp and Kang, “The Global Impact of Quotas.”
54 Angrist and Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics.
55 We do not include whether parties in a country have voluntarily adopted gender quotas due to the lack of over-time data.
56 Hughes et al., “Global Gender Quota Adoption.”
57 See, for example, Caprioli, “Gendered Conflict”; Koch and Fulton, “In the Defense of Women”; Hudson et al., Sex and World Peace; Best et al., “Legislative Gender Diversity.”
58 Cole, “Government Respect”; Fallon et al., “Resolving the Democracy Paradox”; Hughes and Tripp, “Civil War and Trajectories of Change.”
59 Inglehart and Norris, Rising Tide; Cherif, Myths about Women’s Rights.
60 We construct an index of modernization based on Chatagnier and Castelli (“The Arc of Modernization”) who use principal component analysis on the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) accounted for by the industrial, agricultural, and service sectors, the percentage of the population living in urban areas, and the percentage of females who have attained at least some secondary education. We apply the same method and update the data to cover the period until 2010.
61 We find similar results when we estimate the models using the minimum sample of Column 5 in . See Table A13 of the supporting appendix.
62 Kim, “External Territorial Threats”; Gibler, The Territorial Peace.
63 Asal et al.. “I Want You!”
64 Boix et al., “A Complete Data Set”; Coppedge et al., V-Dem.
65 The details for constructing the stock measure are provided in the Supporting Appendix.
66 Hughes, “Armed Conflict, International Linkages”; Hughes and Tripp, “Civil War and Trajectories of Change”; Tripp, Women and Power in Post-Conflict Africa; Webster et al., “Conflict, Peace, and the Evolution.”
67 Schroeder, “When Security Dominates the Agenda.”
68 Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?; Goldstein, War and Gender.
69 Swers, “Building a Reputation.”
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Alice J. Kang
Alice J. Kang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Kang's research interests include gender quotas, women's representation in the legislature and judiciary, and women's movements with a focus on Africa. She has published a book entitled Bargaining for Women's Rights (University of Minnesota Press) and articles in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Politics and Gender, Gender and Politics, and Perspectives on Politics.
Nam Kyu Kim
Nam Kyu Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University. His research focuses on authoritarian politics, regime/leadership changes, and civil-military relations. His previous research has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and other journals.