WOMEN AND POLITICS: Underrepresentation of Women in National Parliament in Developing States

Abstract

“Can a woman be a Prime Minister?” My answer would have been different if I had been asked this question 10 years ago. Generally women’s political behavior has received less attention, and women’s low representation in politics is a global concern. The stagnation of women in accordance with everything has too often been explained in both popular media and political spheres with reference to cultural and social traditions. Be it in the form of Hindu suttee, African female circumcision, Chinese foot binding, dowry system, or honor killing, are all misogynistic acts where women usually are the victims and men the perpetrators. Even though such practices are not so prominent in today’s world, we cannot deny the fact that there is a clear gender disproportion in the field of politics. I was particularly concerned by the fact that women are underrepresented in the parliament considering that equal representation of both men and women in the decision making body are key to pass down any brilliant laws or regulations in the country. Moreover, a balanced representation is important in decision making levels to have an equitable and sustainable development, to make sure both men and women are taken into consideration. Therefore, the main aim of my paper is to study why women’s representation in the national parliament is low in some developing countries. The gender stereotype, which argues that women on purposefully avoid politics, has consistently been regarded as one of the most intuitive hypotheses in political science. However, despite much attention, scholars have repeatedly found little empirical support for its effect because stereotype is difficult to quantify. With very few women in politics, I assume that the society we live in holds the false belief that women are, by nature, less capable than men and discriminates against women in all sectors. People’s mindset about difference in a gender roles well justify that social and cultural norms play a role in creating gender a disparity in the society

Zangmo 5 which tends to favor men over women for any leadership roles. Women are less ambitious because they are raised to be nurturers, whereas young boys are taught to be ambitious. Through my rough assumptions mentioned above, I was motivated to study and research on the determinants of why women’s representation is relatively low compared to men’s representation in some developing countries. Therefore, in this paper, I attempt to analyze stereotype, drawing

on different theoretical components to measure the concept of stereotype. I conducted a mixed- method bringing in the case study on Bhutan. The main purpose of the case study is to provide a

more thorough analysis and provide supports for my theoretical framework I have developed in this paper. From the case study, I expect to examine the underlying stereotype that explains why only few women are active in the political sphere. Therefore, collecting data on different variables that would help measure stereotype and bringing in the case study of Bhutan enabled me to develop a plausible explanation to why there is underrepresentation of women in politics in some developing countries. My interest in developing a case study on Bhutan was because, like elsewhere in developing states, the number of women in Bhutan contesting for election and being elected is comparatively low. Even though the constitution and electoral laws of Bhutan are gender neutral, the number of women in decision making including politics is very negligible. Some might question that should we be doing something special for women in this egalitarian society, why not for men? Nonetheless, if we leave it up to the desire and want of women and do nothing about it, this trend will be followed which will push women exclusively in the private domain. It is very crucial that we build in positive trend for the younger generation, and eradicate the gender disparity in any forums. Given that more than 50% of the population in Bhutan is women, there needs to be a series of explanations to interpret the relationship between women voters and

Zangmo 6 small number of women being elected. Therefore, I decided to gather different perspectives of Bhutanese men and women regarding stories of their political journey and their observations on the challenges candidates face along the way. Conducting fieldwork in Bhutan enabled me to address this issue. The detail about the case study will be discussed in the following sections. My quantitative research suggests that a higher rate of women labor force leads to higher rate of women representation in the national parliament. Additionally, voter turnout and legislated candidate quota have a significant effect on the proportion of seats held by women in the national parliament. Thus, in this paper, I will first discuss the previous research of women’s low representation in politics. Then I will develop theories that surround the stereotype specifically and discuss how these theories lead to underrepresentation of women in politics, with the case study on Bhutan to justify. Followed by this, I will develop a research design and test my hypotheses by running ordinary least square (OLS) regression and subsequently analyze the findings of my research in relation to the hypotheses assumed. Finally, this paper also suggests some recommendations and policy implications drawing on my strength and limitations of the paper.