Is the Expansion of Women’s Access to Political Leadership Rewarded? Evidence from the Allocation of US Foreign Aid

ABSTRACT

Do donor states reward recipient states for signaling a commitment to expanding the role of women in political decision making? Previous studies show that women are associated with positive outcomes for peace duration and governance. We theorize that donor states reward recipient states that make a commitment to women’s empowerment in political decision making and test our hypotheses using data on the distribution of US foreign aid to recipient states. We find that recipient states that adopt legislative quotas and include more women in their parliaments receive more aid, although a female head of government is not associated with more aid.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign aid
• women’s political representation
• Official Development Assistance
• women’s empowerment
• legislative quotas
• foreign policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Our collinearity tests indicate that democracy and our gender variables are not collinear.

2. The Human Development Report’s Gender Inequality Index employs the adolescent fertility rate as one of its components. See: http://www.hdr.undp.org/.

3. To provide context, the longstanding UN target asks that donor states provide 0.7% of GNI in development aid. Just six Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members met (or exceeded) this target in 2016, most did not. The average among the members of the DAC of the OECD in 2016 was 0.4% of GNI.

4. Although the election of 2018 yielded a record 102 (or 23.5%) women representatives, this still ranks the US 75^th among the 193 countries tracked by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (see: http://archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm).

5. The Official Development Assistance (ODA) reported by OECD-DAC includes grants and concessional loans intended to support the development and welfare of the recipient state. ODA as reported by OECD-DAC does not include military or security aid. See: https://www.oecd.org/dac/financing-sustainable-development/development-finance-standards/official-development-assistance.htm.

6. In our log transformation, we preserved the recipients receiving zero ODA by adding a very small number to the zero before taking the natural log.

7. See: www.guide2womenleaders.com.

8. See the World Bank’s Database of Political Institutions at https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/wps2283-database-political-institutions, or also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_system#Republics_with_a_presidential_system_of_government. Both sources provide the same information.

9. We considered the Women’s Social Rights (WOSOC) measure from the CIRI dataset, but found that it was “retired” as of 2005. Although some data exist for 2007, the measure is plagued by a lot of missing data and does not dovetail well with the temporal domain of our dataset.