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Chapter Two: Theoretical Perspectives
2.1 The Socioeconomic and Cultural Barriers
What explains the level of women’s representation in the political arena? As many political scientists would define politics as an activity primarily concerned with the allocation and distribution of power (Berenskoetter and Williams 2007; Buchanan and Badham 2008; Keohane and Nye 1977; Wight et al. 2002), Blumberg (1984) argues that the most important source of power that affects women’s position in a system of social stratification is economic. Further, he asserts that the greater relative economic power of women, the greater the probability is that it will result in influence in the political sphere.
Reynolds (1999) showed that socioeconomic development levels are notably associated with the percentage of women in parliaments worldwide. In other words, women find harder to enter in the parliaments when they are in a situation of socioeconomic disadvantage due to the burden of low access to education, lack of financial resources, poor health care, and unemployment or underemployment. In the same way, Stockemer (2017) identified that high-income inequalities diminish growth in female political representation. More precisely, he found that the political representation of women in the parliament in countries with high-income inequalities has grown at a rate 20% lower than that of countries with low-income inequality in the last 50 years. This shows that the fight against income inequalities is not only important from a development perspective, since high-income inequalities put women at a disadvantage in the economy, but also from a gender perspective since these inequalities can also affect women in the political arena.
Moreover, Goodnow, Madrid, and Moser (2019) found that, compared to the male candidates, it is usually harder for female candidates to collect funds for their campaigns.
Some scholars found that this issue is related to the level of economic development the country has (Matland 1998; Schmidt 2008; Schwindt-Bayer 2005; Stockemer and Byrne 2012; Tripp and Kang 2008). They argue that women tend to occupy a larger proportion of seats in parliament in more developed countries. They found that development is positively correlated with female representation in parliament because women enjoy
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16 greater economic opportunities in more developed societies and because citizens of more economically developed countries are more likely to support gender equality.
Several social and cultural attitudes have also been argued to influence the level of women’s political representation (Krook and O’Brien 2012; Paxton and Kunovich 2003;
Teczar et al. 2018; Tripp and Kang 2008). Paxton and Kunovich (2003) argue that “ideas about women’s role and position in society can enhance or constrain women’s ability to seek political power” (p.90). They found that cultural attitudes were the most important factor explaining variance in the election of women in the legislature. Therefore, cultural norms can hinder women’s representation in politics. Research on the Nordic countries also shows that the comparatively greater number of women in the legislature in this region is due to a political culture that gives more importance to economic and social equality (Miller 2013). In addition, Inglehart and Norris (2003) show that culture matters:
countries with egalitarian attitudes, such as Sweden and Norway, have more women in parliament. This egalitarian culture is a reflection of broader patterns of socio-economic development and cultural modernization. In contrast, in much of Latin America,
traditional social norms prevail in which it is understood that the role of women is linked to the parental role, while that of men is associated with paid labor. As a result of this, a large part of the population believes that politics is not an appropriate environment for women as this would meddle with their parental obligations. According to the survey conducted by Latinobarómetro (2018) in eighteen Latin American countries, 28 percent of respondents do not agree that half of the members of parliament should be women.
Thames (2017) found strong evidence that, in the long term, socio-cultural factors are relevant in increasing the percentage of women elected to the legislature.
Mcculloch (2012) emphasizes that another important attitudinal factor that can affect the representation of women in politics is the degree of religiosity (the importance of religion for the citizens of a country). Religious rules and standards have traditionally been very involved in the formulation of public policies in many countries of the world and the Latin American region is no exception. As we can observe in Figure 2, according to a survey conducted in the year 2014 by the AmericasBarometer developed by the Latin
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17 American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), a 58% of Latin American Citizens think that religion is very important while only a 6% consider that it is not important at all. Thus, we can see that religion plays a key role in the life of Latin American society.
Figure 2: How Important is Religion for Latin American Citizens, 2014.
Source: The AmericasBarometer by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). Available on the internet at http://lapop.ccp.ucr.ac.cr/LapopDummies.html
Religion gives its devotees a diversity of civic abilities and faster methods of communication. In addition, it fosters a psychological commitment to domestic affairs.
For this reason, it is argued that religiosity promotes political participation (Djupe et al.
2007; Verba, Sidney, and Brady 1995; Wald et al. 1988). Nevertheless, this positive influence of religion on the political participation is not general throughout the citizens.
According to Cassese and Holman (2016), despite women tend to go to church with more consistency and regularity than men and their degree of religiosity is higher, the level of female political representation is not uniformly higher than that of men. Further, existing literature argues that, countries where the population is especially religious, citizens tend
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Very important Rather important Not very important Not important at all
Importance of Religion for Latin American Citizens
%
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18 to be more traditional, conservative and less likely to advocate for female representation in politics (Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Kenworthy and Malami 1999; Mcculloch 2012; Morgan and Buice 2013; Plutzer 1991; Tripp and Kang 2008).
In brief, these arguments show that religious beliefs and cultural and socioeconomic development are relevant factors to explain why in some countries there is more support for the representation of women in politics than others. More specifically, they argue that in countries with greater socio-economic development and cultural modernization, citizens are more likely to support gender equality. Therefore, these factors are crucial to explain female political representation.