International incentives for women’s rights in dictatorships

Abstract

Democracy and women’s rights are integrally “bundled” by the international community. This means that dictatorships can signal adherence to international norms by demonstrating progress on gender equality, often in a manner that is consistent with the perpetuation of authoritarian rule. Using a new dataset of de jure advances in women’s rights, we show that dictatorships have vigorously enacted gender-related legislation, at a rate that surpasses democracies in the developing world. This pattern is shaped by international (Western) pressure: Among autocracies, foreign aid dependence and international nongovernmental organization shaming are associated with legal advances in women’s rights, but not with reforms in other, more politically costly areas related to elections, political competition, and repression. Our account therefore highlights selective compliance as a form of adaptation to international pressure and underscores the role of international incentives as a complement to domestic “bottom-up” pressure for women’s rights in dictatorships.

The Appointment of Women to Authoritarian Cabinets in Africa

“…As many closed autocracies transitioned to electoral autocracies, understandings of democracy were also changing. In the post-Cold War world, wealthy democracies and the international bodies they led increasingly 'bundled' gender-equality norms together with liberal and modern democratic principles (Bush 2011;Donno et al 2022;Towns 2010). This bundling of gender-equality norms with democracy created material and reputational incentives for autocrats to go beyond simply legalizing multiparty competition.…”

“…Annesley et al 2019;Bauer and Darkwah 2022;Davis 1997;Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2016;Studlar and Moncrief 1997). Recent studies advance our understanding of women's representation in legislatures and the adoption of women's rights laws in autocracies (Bush and Zetterberg 2021;Donno et al 2022;Donno and Kreft 2019;Tripp 2019;Valdini 2019), but whether and how this scholarship applies to the gendered selection of ministers is unclear. The incorporation of women in authoritarian cabinets is not well understood, even though scholarly attention to power-sharing in the cabinet, particularly in autocracies in Africa, has grown in recent years (Arriola 2009;Francois et al 2015;Kroeger 2020;Meng 2020; Raleigh and Wigmore-Shepherd 2022; Ricart-Huguet 2021; Woldense 2018).…”

The Impacts of Gender-Related Factors on the Adoption of Anti-Human Trafficking Laws in Sub-Saharan African Countries

“…To be specific, myriad studies demonstrated that female legislators pay more attention to “women’s issues” broadly defined as issues women are likely to be interested in such as welfare, education, women’s health, human rights, and crime (Donno et al, 2022; Meloy, 2015; Osborn, 2012; Schwindt-Bayer, 2010). As a cornerstone work, analyzing the voting records in the U.S. 103rd congress, Swers (1998) demonstrated that the gender of legislators has significant impacts on their legislative behaviors.…”

How Autocrats Weaponize Women's Rights

“…While the push for gender equality has been global, autocracies have-somewhat surprisingly-adopted a majority of these reforms. 4 For instance, of the 75 countries that have adopted gender-based quota laws for parliamentary representation, 5 about two-thirds (51) have been ruled by nondemocratic governments.…”

“…6 With this, the idea of women's inclusion became an integral aspect of democracy-promotion efforts, to the point where gender equality and democracy are now widely seen as intimately connected and have been described as inseparable "bundled norms." 7 The international community has thus increasingly embraced this bundling of democracy and gender while democracy promotion has gained in importance and influenced the behavior and strategies of au-tocrats. In the post-Cold War era, authoritarian states, particularly those with links to Western democracies, have responded to pushes for democracy by developing formal democratic institutions and opening up to elections.…”