Organizational Density, Values, and Women’s Political Empowerment

Women’s non-governmental organizations are theorized to circulate pro-gender equality values that, in turn, help to boost women’s political empowerment. Whereas women’s organizations and pro-gender equality values play a role in women’s political empowerment, the theoretical and cross-national empirical literatures rarely address the fact that there are ideological divisions in the field of women’s organizations. Some women’s organizations are for “gender equality” and others are “gender traditionalist.” If organizations are a prime carrier of values, then the density of organizations of particular ideological types may impact both the circulation of pro-gender equality values and the level of women’s empowerment. Although the theoretical and empirical literature examine both the relationship between values and women’s empowerment, and the relationship between organizations and empowerment, the frame that links values, organizations, ideological density, and empowerment needs elucidation. I propose a way to build and empirically examine a frame of this kind. I employ Structural Equation Modeling with country-years as units of analysis to test the frame. In this paper, I focus on high levels of ideological density and pose three hypotheses. Hypothesis 1: A high density of pro-gender equality organizations would increase the association between pro-gender equality values and women’s political empowerment. Hypothesis 2: A high density of gender traditionalist organizations would reduce the association between pro-gender equality values and women’s political empowerment. Hypothesis 3: An equally high density of both ideological types (gender equality and gender traditionalist) would directly boost women’s political empowerment. According to this logic, an equal density of each opens up a diverse set of women’s voices, bypassing values to a certain extent and encouraging women of various ideological worldviews to seize political power. To test these hypotheses, I use several data sources. The data on organizations come from the Union of International Associations (UIA) database, which contains information on names, organizational goals, and number of members of national and international organizations. I examine both national and international organizations with coding drawn from Paxton et al. (2018). I develop a measurement of ideological density with distinct “gender equality” and “gender traditionalist” codes based on organizational goals. I use aggregated pro-gender equality values from Welzel’s Emancipative Values coding in the WVS/EVS integrated dataset. The time frame of this paper is 1999 – 2021. I measure women’s political empowerment with the Varieties of Democracy dataset on power distributed by gender. Varieties of Democracy, Quality of Governance, and the World Bank are the sources for control variables, such as economic development, type of political regime, percentage of female legislators, civil society organizations (CSO) women’s participation. The latter control variable shows whether women are prevented from participation in civil society organizations.