Women’s representation in Asian parliaments: a QCA approach

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines the relationship between socioeconomic development, corruption, the level of democracy, and women’s parliamentary representation in contemporary Asia. Previous studies have argued economic development offers women new opportunities and resources to participate in politics. Despite some notable gains in gender equality through this process, prosperous Asian nations perform poorly compared to other world regions in terms of women’s parliamentary representation. Using an emerging method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) on a dataset of 47 Asian nations, this research suggests the level of women’s presence in legislatures throughout Asia is a result of multiple configurations of conditions beyond simply one or two explanatory variables. In contrast to the expectations of modernisation theory, this paper finds that national economic variables do not account effectively for the level of women’s political representation in Asia. Furthermore, countries with predominantly Muslim populations can still elect more women if other conditions are supportive.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• Asia
• representation
• gender
• parliament
• QCA

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 Women in Asia conference in Perth, Western Australia. I would like to thank the University of Western Australia (UWA) and Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship for the support. I also thank Arch Woodside, Graham Brown, Samina Yasmeen, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. Any errors that remain are my sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Ella S. Prihatini is a political science and international relations researcher at the University of Western Australia (UWA), Perth. She is now in her final year of completing her PhD. She holds a BA in International Relations (University of Gadjah Mada/UGM, Yogyakarta) and Master of Development Practice (Adv) (University of Queensland/UQ, Brisbane). Her research interests focus on women’s political participation, gender studies of Asia, young voters, and electoral politics in Indonesia. Ella is affiliated with the UWA Centre for the Muslim States and Societies (CMSS). Her study at UWA is fully supported by the Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship program (2015–2019).

ORCID

Ella S. Prihatini http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6710-1250