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The Gender Gap in Latin America: Contextual and Individual Influenceson Gender and Political Participation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2009

Scott Desposato  and
Barbara Norrander
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Abstract

While a substantial literature explores gender differences in participation inthe United States, Commonwealth countries and Western Europe, little attentionhas been given to gender’s impact on participation in the developingworld. These countries have diverse experiences with gender politics: some havebeen leaders in suffrage reforms and equal rights, while, in others, divorce hasonly recently been legalized. This article examines the relationship betweengender and participation in seventeen Latin American countries. Many coreresults from research in the developed world hold in Latin America as well.Surprisingly, however, there is no evidence that economic development providesan impetus for more equal levels of participation. Instead, the most importantcontextual factors are civil liberties and women’s presence among thevisible political elite.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 141 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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30 We are unable to test for the effects of children on participation as no question on parenthood was included in the Latinobarometro survey.

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37 We also tested two other institutional factors: date of female suffrage and compulsory voting laws. Neither had any direct influence on the gender gap in participation. However, the date of female suffrage has an indirect effect through age and political generations.

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53 Predicted values come from the reduced models. Where interactions were not included in the reduced model, the gender gap will be unaffected by covariates, by design. See, for example, Religiosity in Table 3.

54 Most Latin American countries restrict voting to those 18 years of age or older; Brazil allows literate 16 and 17 year olds to vote.

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56 Note that in all cases of significant interactions, the overall effects of gender are significant after adjusting for the covariance of the combined main and interaction effects, except in two cases, both discussed in the text.

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61 Recall that the Freedom House scores are coded such that low scores are the most free, and high scores the least free.

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67 Setting positive interactions with Womanto their maximum empirical values and interactions with negative coefficients to their minimum empirical values.

68 Inglehart and Norris, Rising Tide.

69 See http://www.latinobarometro.org.

70 Inter-Parliamentary Union, Women in National Parliaments, http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif-arc.htm.

71 See http://www.freedomhouse.org for more details.