Gender and Political Representation in a (Post-) Pandemic Era: How the Increased Salience of Health and Poverty Issues Affects Women´s Political Inclusion and Power in Low-Income Countries

The current global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented global health crisis and propelled nations into new poverty crises, jeopardizing hard-won development gains in the world’s most vulnerable countries.

These twin public health and poverty crises in low-income countries are intimately connected to policy domains that tend to be prioritized by women citizens and politicians: public health and poverty alleviation.

In this project, we ask what happens when a global crisis suddenly shifts global attention towards issues historically prioritized by women.

More specifically, this project explores the pandemic’s impacts on (1) the presence of women in political decision-making (descriptive representation) and on (2) the policy priorities and legislative behavior of men and women political leaders (substantive representation) in low-income countries. To address these issues, we use an innovative and ambitious mixed-method approach.

We propose five separate studies, including quantitative analyzes of changes in women´s numeric representation and budget allocations in low-income countries, analyses of legislative speech data from thirteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a comparative case study of Malawi and Zimbabwe, and survey experiments with citizens in these two countries to gauge how citizens´ demands for women politicians have been affected by the pandemic.