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ABSTRACT
The association between women’s political empowerment and social spending in welfare regimes is well established, but research on the association with social protection responses to COVID-19 is just beginning. This paper looks at the association between women’s political empowerment index (WPEI) and the scopes of social protections found in individual countries. Poisson regression models were used with datasets from the Goble Database on Social Protection and Jobs Responses to COVID-19, World Development Indicators, and V-Dem to identify national and regional differences in social protection coverage. The findings indicate the countries with higher WPEI values have greater ranges of social protections. In particular, there is a significantly positive association between degree of women’s political empowerment in the form of civil society participation and social protection scope. Our results provide new evidence suggesting that increasing women’s civil society participation is a clear pathway to improving social protection scope.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02185385.2022.2131617.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fang-Yi Huang
Fang-Yi Huang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at Yuan Ze University. She specializes in gender inequality, health, aging, and pension scheme.
Jiun-Da Lin
Jiun-Da Lin is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of National Development at National Taiwan University. He specializes in comparative political economy and global governance.