Does War Improve Women’s Political Representation?

I revisit the widely-accepted finding that war produces an improvement in women’s political empowerment. Recently, a growing body of studies argue that war, particularly civil wars, disrupt existing power arrangements and social institutions and open the opportunities for women to improve their political power by allowing women to reform political institutions and to participate the processes of conflict management and peace building. Among others, Webster, Chen, and Beardsley (2019) (hereafter WCB) provide the most systematic evidence for the argument that war leads to an increase in women’s political empowerment. Despite its important contributions, however, two important puzzles remain unresolved. First, it is not clear whether war improves women’s political representation because the measure of women’s political empowerment used in their analysis, obtained from the Varieties of Democracy Project, is an aggregate index capturing multiple dimensions including women’s legislative representation. The other remaining question is whether intrastate and interstate wars have similar effects on women’s political empowerment and representation. Second, WCB find no difference between civil and interstate war, which is puzzling, given that civil wars tend to be more frequent, deadlier, and longer-lasting and present unique opportunities to renegotiate and reshape domestic governance and political institutions. I attempt to examine whether civil war increases women’s legislative representation by re-examining WCB’s data. My analysis reveals that civil wars are correlated with a decrease in women’s legislative representation. This result holds even when I focus on the termination of civil war via gender-inclusive peace agreements or when I limit my analysis to a specific temporal (e.g., the post-Cold War era) or a regional context (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa). Last, I find a similar pattern when I examine the relationship between civil wars and women’s cabinet appointments. These results pose a challenge to the conventional wisdom that civil war leads to the improvement of women's political representation.