WOMEN’S POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ASSISTANCE PERSPECTIVE. A Quantitative Large-N Study of ODA Recipient Countries

Abstract: Promoting gender equality and closing the persisting gender gap is critical for achieving wide-ranging global objectives and sustainable development for all. One of the key domains in achieving gender equality is women’s political empowerment, which shows the least and slowest progress among all domains, even within the European Union. Regardless that women represent nearly half of the global workforce, they still have limited access to leadership and decision-making roles, as the political arena manifests unequal power relations and male domination across all levels. Due to a fundamental shift in the philosophy of development cooperation over the last decades, gender equality and women empowerment have been placed at the heart of donor programming. As a result, the international donor community has increasingly invested in closing the gender gap both through multilateral and bilateral aid. Despite existing theories and empirical evidence on pathways for increasing female participation in political life, no previous research has been conducted to explicitly explore the impact of the development assistance on women’s political empowerment. This thesis aims to address this gap both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, it combines influential feminist theories with the development literature to build a theoretical framework to explain how gendered international assistance affects women’s political empowerment. Empirically, it tests testable propositions derived from the theoretical framework in a cross-section of developing countries.