A Study on Aid Effectiveness : How Aid Donor's Political Characteristics Affect Women's Political Participation in Recipient Countries
Do political characteristics in donor countries affect women's political participation in recipient countries?
Whi...
A Study on Aid Effectiveness : How Aid Donor's Political Characteristics Affect Women's Political Participation in Recipient Countries
Do political characteristics in donor countries affect women's political participation in recipient countries?
While gender equality and potential role of political leadership has received little attention in the ODA literature, several studies have shown that women and leftist favor policies that foster social equity including women issues. To examine the relationship between aid donor's political characteristics―women's political representation and government partisanship―and women's political participation in recipient countries, I suggest the following two hypotheses: ODA from donor countries with high level of female political representation would increase women's political participation in recipient countries; ODA from donor countries with left government is more likely to increase women's political participation in recipients than that from right government donors.
Using a cross-national time-series data covering 156 recipient countries as well as top five largest donors―United States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom and France―from 1995 to 2014, I find the strong evidence which supports my expectations. The empirical result shows that the higher women representation (women's proportion in parliament) in donors have a strong positive effect on women's political participation (women's proportion in parliament) in aid recipient countries. This implies that donor countries with the high number of female legislators are likely to make a bill supporting women's empowerment in recipients. Furthermore, the result also indicates that ODA from left government countries is more likely to increase women's political participation in recipient countries than that from right government in general except for the case of France which is statistically insignificant.
In conclusion, this finding has two implications. First, considering gender equality and women's empowerment, this research focuses on women in political sphere that has been largely ignored. Second, this thesis examines the quality of ODA, rather than the quantity by investigating the interactive effect of the amount of ODA and political factors in donor countries.