This paper evaluates the presence of gender-based differences in political preferences in a cross-section of 19 African countries, using nationally representative data culled from Afrobarometer. Specifically it focuses on whether female and male constituents differ in their policy priorities across 10 meaningful policy areas (economy, poverty, infrastructure, health, agriculture, water, education, violence, social/political rights and services).
The paper finds that the effect of gender on the prioritization of many of these policy domains is statistically significant, but it however cannot as robustly claim that these differences are substantially significant given that (a) the size of coefficients are relatively small (compared to findings from advanced industrial democracies) and (b) it only finds minor differences in priority rankings across the two sexes.
Key findings:
- Measures of women’s economic and social status correlate with the size of the gender gap for the policy domains illustrating a favourable gap (economy) and unfavourable gap (water). However, the relationship between these correlates and the unfavourable gap, access to water, is larger and more statistically significant than it is for the favourable gap, management of the economy. This may be explained by the truncated nature of the sample, which is restricted to a set of relatively low-income countries that are more likely to suffer from problems of fiscal and bureaucratic capacity that weaken the relationship between women’s financial liberation and government policy.
- Greater financial independence of women, proxied by female labour participation, closes the gaps between men’s and women’s prioritization of the economy and access to clean water. These results are consistent with earlier research that attributed shifts in women’s political preferences in response to changes in their economic standing within the home and within society at large. Women’s vulnerability widens the differences between genders on the economy, though this effect is admittedly small. The effect of Islam is both larger and more nuanced than the other two factors: While it increases the size of the gap for water prioritization, it reverses the typical gender gap for management of the economy, leading women to prioritize it more than men. This latter counter-intuitive effect seems to be a result of shifts in the economic preferences of Muslim men more than Muslim women.
- There is a strong positive relationship between the gender gap in preferences and barriers to women’s preference aggregation in the form of women’s participation and women’s representation. In other words, it is exactly in countries where women and men have the most distinct preferences that we also find that women face the greatest difficulties to participate in politics and to get elected to office.
