Female Political Empowerment and Unconventional Political Participation: a Time-Series Cross-Sectional Analysis

Research on political participation has recently strongly focused on gender differences. Although most research argues that the gender gap closes over time, a systematic longitudinal analysis to explain this convergence is lacking. This study seeks to fill this gap by investigating the gender gap across time. Drawing on vast empirical evidence, it argues that differences in unconventional political participation between men and women diminish with increasing female political empowerment, which is conceptualized as a process of increasing equality in human rights (freedom of choice), female participation in civil society (agency), as well as descriptive representation (engagement). To investigate the extent to which (changes in) female political empowerment mitigate the gender gap in political participation, this study uses an innovative methodological approach. The Integrated Value Studies dataset, which combines World Value Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS) data, is merged with data on female political empowerment from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). This allows for the analysis of a period of nearly forty years (1981 to 2020) across more than 100 countries. By applying multilevel modelling and time-series cross-sectional models (TSCS), empirical results show that female political empowerment indeed moderates inequalities in political participation. Overall, the study contributes to research on the gender gap of political participation in three ways: Empirically, it provides a large-N and longitudinal perspective. Theoretically, it highlights the importance of female political empowerment. Methodologically, it allows to compare the strength of several individual and contextual factors.