Abstract
Previous studies find that autocratic regimes strategically promote women leaders as a means of enhancing their international reputation through virtue signaling without necessarily prioritizing genuine empowerment of women. In this project, we systematically analyze the career paths of female ministers to provide a more nuanced understanding of why autocracies appoint women to cabinet positions. Using an original dataset of female ministers’ occupation before being appointed combined with the Path to Power (PtP) dataset, we seek to identify the conditions under which autocrats appoint women leaders for merely symbolic purposes versus situations where the signaling is more determined and meaningful, which could lead to unintended consequences that contribute to the advancement of women’s rights.
Introduction
Why do autocratic leaders appoint women to cabinet positions? Existing studies explain that authoritarian regimes appoint female ministers to demonstrate to democracy donors or to make a gesture to domestic opponents that appears to loosen the chains of oppression. If so, it is challenging to argue that autocrats appoint relevant experts to the position or such appointees are necessarily to advance women’s rights. The authoritarian leadership can send the desired signals internally and externally simply by appointing women to high-level government and ministerial positions.This study aims to explore whether, when autocratic leaders appoint female cabinet ministers, and whether such appointments serve as a symbolic signaling or trigger significant advancement of women’s rights
What Do We Know?
Women in Authoritarian Cabinets
Figure 1 shows the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of women’s share of cabinet posts in entire autocracies from 1966 to 2021, based on WhoGov (Nyrup and Bramwell 2020) data. It depicts the patterns of growth in women’s cabinet share increases and varies greatly. We can suspect two things here: first, authoritarian regimes are more likely than before to appoint female leaders to their cabinets in general. Second, the trends are not uniform across all authoritarian regimes. Female ministers are appointed more frequently in authoritarian regimes than in democratic regimes.
The left panel (Panel 2a) of Figure 2 is a replicate of Figure 1 in Kroeger and Kang (2022)[2], with data from 1966 to 2021. Women’s cabinet share in African authoritarian regimes has increased over the last thirty years, as evidenced by Kroeger and Kang (2022) . In 2021, it is expected to be around 18.6 percent, which is 6.37 times higher than the cabinet share in 1988. Asian authoritarian regimes continue to have a lower rate of women in cabinet than African authoritarian regimes, despite showing increasing patterns in women’s cabinet share. Even in 2021, the median cabinet share in Asian authoritarian regimes is approximately 8.6 percent, which is 2.18 times less than the cabinet share in African authoritarian regimes in the same year.
How Do Autocrats Instrumentalize Womens Rights?
Democratic Aid Donors
Figure 3 depicts the natural logged distribution of net official development assistance (ODA) from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to African and Asian countries between 1966 and 2021. Women’s cabinet share in African and Asian countries is increasing at a similar rate, as shown in Figure 2. Using aid data, it is difficult to account for differences in women’s cabinet share between Africa and Asia.
Domestic Offsets to Autocratization
Existing theories expect that Asian countries will exhibit more democratic characteristics than Africancountries because autocrats in Asian countries are less likely to appoint females to cabinet positions due to a lack of need to offset domestic autocratization and secure women’s support.
Average Electoral Democracy Index from V-Dem: Africa and Asia
What Do We Want to Know?
If appointments depend on the regime’s characteristics and the autocrat’s preferences, despite an increase in female appointments, we may not see significant changes in women’s rights over time. It means that autocratic regimes strategically promote women leaders as a means of enhancing their international reputation through virtue signaling without necessarily prioritizing genuine empowerment of women. We propose to test two competing hypotheses on female minister appointments in authoritarian cabinets:
Hypothesis 1 (Symbolic appointment): Autocracies are more likely to appoint female ministers based on personal ties to the leadership group rather than professional experience.
Hypothesis 2 (Genuine appointment): Autocracies are more likely to appoint female ministers based on their professional experience rather than their ties to the leadership group.
Using an original dataset of female ministers’ occupation before being appointed combined with the Path to Power (PtP) dataset, we identify the conditions under which autocrats appoint women leaders for merely symbolic purposes versus situations where the signaling is more determined and meaningful, which could lead to unintended consequences that contribute to the advancement of women’s rights.
Hypothesis 3 (Conditional appointment): Autocracies that rely heavily on democratic aid donors are more likely to make genuine appointments for female ministers, whereas other autocracies are more likely to make symbolic appointments.
Data and Estimation Strategy
Data
We begin by tracking the personal careers of appointed ministers in authoritarian countries using the WHOGOV dataset (Nyrup and Bramwell 2020) and newly updated Path to Power (PtP) dataset (Nyrup, Knutsen, and Langsæther 2023), a dataset on personal records on government members. We conducted individual internet searches for each minister. The data was gathered primarily from publicly available sources such asWikipedia, Linkedin, biographies, obituaries, and newspaper articles.
We focus on Asian countries and classify them using the geopolitical classification provided by the “Diversity of Democracies” project (V-Dem). V-Dem divides the world into ten regions: Eastern Europe and post Soviet Union (including Central Asia, Mongolia, and German Democratic Republic), Latin America (including Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic), North Africa and the Middle East (including Israel and Turkey, but excluding Cyprus), SubSaharan Africa, Western Europe and North America (including Australia, New Zealand, and Cyprus, but excluding German Democratic Republic), Eastern Asia (including Japan, excluding Mongolia), SouthEastern Asia, Southern Asia, The Pacific (excluding Australia and New Zealand), The Caribbean (including Guyana and Suriname, but excluding Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic). The sample for this study is restricted to the Asian region.
Estimation Strategy
We establish binary logistic regression models with country-fixed effects to estimate the dependent variable of female, which indicates female ministers as 1, otherwise 0. One of our main predictors are manipulated from occupation variable. First, Military or Police variable indicate if an individual was a member of military or police prior to the appointment. Second, Party Membership measures the individuals who Worked for a political party or an organization with strong ties to a party prior to the appointment. Lastly, Professionality implies individuals who should have professional ability, including academic (research and tertiary education), teacher in primary or secondary education, judge or lawyer, medical doctor or other health care worker, CEO/owner large private company (more than 50 employees), and other white-collar job (public sector). Another predictor is the type of authoritarian regimes: Junta, Dominant Party, and Civilian regime. Junta is the reference group.
\[ \begin{aligned} \log\left[ \frac { P( \operatorname{female} = \operatorname{1} ) }{ 1 - P( \operatorname{female} = \operatorname{1} ) } \right] =&\beta_{0} + \beta_{1}(\operatorname{PH.D.}) + \beta_{2}(\operatorname{Professionality}) + \beta_{3}(\operatorname{Military}) + \beta_{4}(\operatorname{Party\ Membership})\\& + \beta_{5}(\operatorname{Political\ Experience}_{\operatorname{Informal}}) + \beta_{6}(\operatorname{Political\ Experience}_{\operatorname{Formal}})\\&+ \beta_{7}(\operatorname{EDI}) + \beta_{8}(\operatorname{Participation}) + \delta (\operatorname{C}_{\operatorname{country}}) \end{aligned} \]
Summary of the Preliminary Results
In this preliminary analyses, we only built baseline models for the first and second hypotheses.
The most influential factors to determine women’s cabinet appointment was presence of political experience.
Compared to individuals without political experience, females who served for informal and formal positions are more likely to be appointed.
Professionality,Military or Police, andParty Membershipvariables were not statistically significant as expected.
Positions in the cabinet can matter.
- Although we did not tell different positions of ministers in the sample, positions can matter as they require different professions for the appointees.
Need to include other variables from existing theories.
- To test conditional hypothesis, we need to include more variables from existing theories to control and identify the conditions that can affect the hypothetical relationship between predictors and dependent variables