11:20 - 13:00
P2-S45
Room: 1A.02
Chair/s:
Lala Muradova
Discussant/s:
Irene Sanchez-Vitores
Women's Group Empowerment Can Increase Political Participation: Evidence from Five Coordinated Field Experiments
P2-S45-4
Presented by: Lauren Young
Alexander Coppock 5, Susan Hyde 4, Eddy Malesky 2, Mathias Poertner 3Lauren Young 1
1 UC Davis
2 Duke University
3 London School of Economics
4 UC Berkeley
5 Yale University
Non-electoral forms of political participation, such as attending local meetings, contacting public officials, and making demands for public funds, are critical for leaders to effectively respond to the needs of marginalized groups. This article presents a preregistered meta-analysis of five coordinated field experiments aimed at evaluating whether collective efficacy, perceived injustice, and group identity can motivate women to engage more actively and effectively in non-electoral forms of political participation. We show that the intervention increased participation in a community grants program by an average of 13.7 points, with statistically significant and positive effects in four of five studies. We estimate that the treatment had demonstrable positive effects on the level of participation, the quality of participation, and responsiveness to women’s policy goals in two of our five sites. Our analysis of mechanisms shows that the effects on our main outcomes could have been mediated by collective efficacy as well as complementary processes that resulted from the training programs, such as self-efficacy, political knowledge, social networks, and shared policy priorities. We interpret this as evidence that this type of group empowerment intervention can increase political participation by marginalized groups beyond common informational treatments, and encourage further research to better understand when it is more likely to be effective.
Keywords: gender; political participation; field experiment; responsiveness; women; social psychology; collective efficacy

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