Published
1. Women and Power in Africa Aspiring, Campaigning, and Governing Edited by Leonardo Arriola, Martha Johnson, and Melanie Phillips' Available for Pre-Order Here. 2. Honig, L., Ferree, K., Lust, E., and Phillips, M. Land and Legibility: When do Citizens Expect Secure Property Rights in Weak States? Forthcoming at American Political Science Review Pre-Analysis Plan |
This book offers unique insights on how women in African countries participate in three stages of politics: party nominations, election campaigns, and governance. We examine women's access to, and exercise of, political power across a range of African countries, including countries often overlooked in scholarship on gender because they have relatively few women in elected office. It provides a gendered perspective on some of the most critical topics in the study of Africa, including campaign strategies amid clientelism, party institutionalization, and political violence. We presents new data on women's engagement with politics that was collected using a variety of methodologies. It brings new perspectives to the scholarship on gender in electoral politics both in terms of comparative politics and African politics more specifically The legibility of property rights and the state’s authority are often conflated in debates over land titling. This can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that citizens anticipate would strengthen their property rights. This study examines the effects of legibility on citizens’ evaluations of property rights in Malawi, a country with limited but increasing land titling. We argue that legibility is a strategic resource for citizens, which has value in itself. To disentangle the impacts of legibility and authority on tenure security, we employ a conjoint survey experiment. Our findings show that legibility matters above all else. Respondents perceived land with written property rights to be more secure and more desirable regardless of whether a state or customary authority granted these land rights. In contrast to scholarship that examines legibility as a technology of state control, this research suggests that legibility can help citizens advance their interests. |
3. Johnson, M., Phillips, M. (2019). Gender politics. In Routledge Handbook of Democratization in Africa, edited by Gabrielle Lynch and Peter VonDoep. London: Routledge Press
[Chapter Here] |
In this chapter, we show how political openings facilitated women’s mobilization in Africa, as well as why electoral competition, or minimalist democracy, does not guarantee women’s representation and why Africa’s contemporary authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes have often produced similar or higher proportions of women in politics.
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Party switching among legislative candidates has important implications for accountability and representation in democratizing countries. We argue that party switching is influenced by campaign costs tied to the clientelistic politics that persist in many such countries. Candidates who are expected to personally pay for their campaigns, including handouts for voters, will seek to affiliate with parties that can lower those costs through personal inducements and organizational support. Campaign costs also drive candidate selection among party leaders, as they seek to recruit candidates who can finance their own campaigns. We corroborate these expectations with an original survey and embedded choice experiment conducted among parliamentary candidates in Zambia. The conjoint analysis shows that candidates prefer larger parties that offer particularistic benefits. The survey further reveals that parties select for business owners as candidates—the very candidates most likely to defect from one party to another.
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Under Review
5. Family Matters: Gendered Candidate Selection by Party Gatekeepers Job Market Paper Here |
Women's access to political office has grown significantly in the last century, however, that growth has not bee ubiquitous around the world. In countries where women's descriptive representation has been stagnant, demand-based explanations for lower levels of women in political office have largely focused on the role of voters and their biases. Yet, even before women candidates are assessed by voters, they must surpass another hurdle: they must be chosen as candidates by party gatekeepers or selectorates. In studying the preferences of party selectorates, I argue that greater attention must be paid to the family background of candidates. Candidates are not solely judged by their individual attributes; they are evaluated based on family attributes that are perceived in gendered ways. I find that women are differentially evaluated through family status and loyalty mechanisms. Party selectorates reward men in candidate selection for being the heads of traditional households. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be rewarded when their families have histories of demonstrated partisan loyalty. Selectorate's evaluations of candidates and their family attributes are additionally conditioned by their own levels of ambivalent sexism. I evaluate these claims through a survey experiment with 1,339 party selectorates in Zambia. The paper provides several novel findings in the study of women in politics. First, I show that family backgrounds are one of the strongest predictors of candidate selection for both men and women; it is also one of the most gendered. Second, I show that the gender of party selectorates does not substantively change how candidates are evaluated: women selectorates show no gender preference for women aspirants, and like men, punish women candidates who deviate from cultural expectations. Lastly, an individual's level of sexist beliefs condition how they view more masculine candidate attributes such as financial resources. Those with higher levels of sexism are shown to favor men and those with lower levels favor women.
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Working Papers
6. Women’s Household Bargaining Power and Abortion Policy Preferences: Evidence from Zambian Politicians with Arriola, Choi, Davis, Rakner. |
Restrictions on access to legal abortion have created a public health crisis in many countries. But men and women policymakers often disagree on the expansion of reproductive rights. While most women policymakers are expected to support expanding abortion access, we argue that higher income reduces women politicians' support for liberalization because their wealth enables them to sidestep the restrictions created by abortion laws. We corroborate this expectation through a survey experiment conducted among more than 600 politicians in Zambia, a country with high rates of maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion. We show that only women politicians with lower incomes will increase their support for liberalization once exposed to the mortality costs of abortion restrictions. We further show that this effect is conditioned by income rather than education or marital status. Our findings underscore how income inequalities influence the substantive representation offered by women politicians.
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7. Partisanship, Gender, and the Structure of Politician Networks in Zambia with Arriola, Choi, Davis, Rakner. |
Although women have entered government in African countries at an unprecedented rate over the past three decades, it remains unknown to what extent they have acquired the influence necessary to shape policymaking. Are women able to exercise personal influence to the same degree or in the same ways as their male counterparts? We argue that women tend to be less influential than men due to the structure of their personal networks with other politicians. Prior scholarship on African politics has demonstrated that political outcomes depend on the personal ties that connect politicians to one other. Based on a novel network survey among Zambian candidates, we demonstrate that women tend to be peripherally situated within networks. We find that women are systematically less likely to be connected to others in social or work networks among politicians. We also demonstrate that, while having fewer connections than men, women have connections with more important people in both social and work networks.
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Other Works
8. Phillips, (2020). Partnership Lessons 5: Malawi Taxes for Public Services with the Institute for Public Opinion and Research Article Here |
This brief summarizes responses from an interview with the implementing partners on this project, Mwayi Masumbu (Associate Researcher) and Dr. Boniface Dulani (Senior Partner and co-author). The interview discussed the decisions to partner with the Institute for Public Opinion and Research (IPOR), how this collaboration worked during the implementation of the project, and their recommendations for future research. |