Control Variables

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

32 The V-Dem Institute developed the Egalitarian Component Index⁴, which is labeled Egalitarianism of Political Institutions in this thesis, by averaging their others following indices:

 Equal Protection Index, which is formed by taking the estimates of the indicators of equality of social classes when respecting civil liberties, the degree of equality of social groups, and the percentage of the population with the weakest civil liberties.

 Equal Distribution of Resources, that includes the point estimates of indicators of the distribution of public or particularistic goods, the implementation of universalistic

welfare versus means-tested policies, the degree of educational equality, and how equal is health care access.

 And, because neither the protection of rights and liberties or the equitable resources distribution is enough to guarantee an equitable representation of women, there was also included the Equal Access Index, which basically analyses the following questions: do all citizens have equal opportunities to access power? Or is power distributed by

socioeconomic position, social group or gender?

In order to test the hypothesis of this research, I incorporate an interaction term of the two variables mentioned before: Gender Quota Laws*Egalitarian Political Institutions.

Both variables interact in increasing women’s political representation and so, as stated in my theoretical argument, I expect a positive association between the interaction term and the percentage of seats occupied by women in the lower chambers.

3.1.3 Control Variables

4 According to the V-Dem V9 Dataset Codebook, there is no information showing that the V-Dem research team considers women’s political representation in constructing the Egalitarian Component Index. In my dataset, the Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the Index and women’s representation in lower chambers is 33.3, suggesting that the correlation of these two variables is not high. Moreover, there is also no information showing that the V-Dem research team considers the adoption of gender quota laws in constructing the Index. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the Index and Gender Quota Laws is 0.298, suggesting that the two variables are not highly correlated.

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

33 Previous literature (Htun 2003; True and Mintrom 2001) argues that advanced

education prepares people to be ministers or parliamentarians. However, data concerning women’s attainment of tertiary education are not available for most Latin American countries. Therefore, I will measure female education as the proportion of women in secondary education age enrolled in secondary school. The literature also posits that more female candidates will get appointments to government offices as the percentage of women professionals increments (Hughes and Paxton 2008; Jaquette 1997; Rosenbluth et al. 2006). Because data regarding women holding professional jobs are not available, the percentage of women in the workforce is commonly substituted. Thus, my second control variable is workforce participation which I measure with the percentage of the labor force comprised of women. I will gather the data for these two variables from the World Bank’s Gender Statistics Data Base.

In addition, I utilize Human Development Index (HDI), elaborated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to measure the overall education level of the countries. As Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson (2005) suggest, the percentage of the population of a country with higher education could better measure the more open-minded and egalitarian perspective that society is expected to have with the increment of education levels, but because tertiary education statistics are missing for some years, I will employ the HDI to estimate the general level of education of the population.

Moreover, previous literature shows that women are more likely to receive political appointments from a leftist president (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2005) hence I will control for whether the president is from a left party. I will operationalize this through a dummy variable coded “1” for a leftist government and “0” otherwise. The data will be gathered from The Database of Political Institutions 2018 developed by the Inter-American Development Bank.

I also control the district magnitude of the countries which is basically the number of seats per district (Matland and Montgomery 2003). According to Matland (1995), district magnitudes are relevant due to their leading role in party strategy when choosing

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

34 candidates. Thus, I include a control variable with the average district magnitude size.

The data for this variable is collected from the dataset of district magnitude developed by Laura Wills Otero⁵.

Most scholars agree that closed-list systems, where a party-list is voted on and party heandmen manage the order in which the applicants are placed on the party-list, are more likely to be favorable in choosing women other types of voting systems (Htun and Jones 2002; Krook 2006; Larserud and Taphorn 2007; Norris 2004). I will include a dummy variable coded as “1” when the country has a closed-list system, and “0”

otherwise. The data is from the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC).

Existing literature argues that, countries where citizens are particularly religious, tend to be conservative and less likely to support women’s representation in politics (Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Morgan and Buice 2013;

Mcculloch 2012; Plutzer 1991). Thus, I will include a variable to control the religiosity of a country. The data for this variable comes from survey data available from 2004 to 2014 from the AmericasBarometer developed by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). Specifically, LAPOP includes one question asking how often do you attend the religious services which can be used to measure the degree of religiosity of the citizens.

Some scholars highlight that the level of democracy shapes women’s access to political positions (Friedman 1998; Paxton, Hughes, and Painter II 2010; Pierson 2000;

Waylen 1994; Viterna and Fallon 2008). They argue that that initial levels and growth in democracy produce gains in women’s political representation because the level of democracy in a country establishes the general context in which women are placed in political positions or placed in political positions. Thus, I control the level of democracy lagged by one year, which I measure with the Polity Score in the Polity IV dataset

5 Available online at https://uniandes.academia.edu/LauraWillsOtero.

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

35 developed by the Center for Systemic Peace (CSP). The Polity Score examines the

concurrent qualities of democratic and autocratic authority in government institutions.

Lastly, existing literature argues that the overall level of economic development in the country has positive effects on women’s political opportunities (Duflo 2012; Matland 1998; Stockemer 2015). In short, their argument is that development leads to a

weakening of traditional values, greater urbanization, greater participation of the labor force and education for women and changes in attitude in the perceptions of appropriate roles for women. To control the level of economic development of the countries, I control for GDP per capita, which basically is the gross domestic product divided by the midyear population. This variable is operationalized as the logged value of the GDP per capita for the year prior to the election year. The data is from the World Bank’s World

Development Indicators.