Revolution Starts at Home: Women's Civic Engagement and In-House Female Support

• In Event: Parenthood, Marriage, and Participation

Abstract

In low-middle income countries where prevailing social norms are gendered, patrilocality and multi-generational co-residence is common. How does support from within these multi-generational households impact women's political engagement? Traditionally thought of as vectors of norm reinforcement, we highlight an understudied medium of norm change existing within multi-generational homes, the support of other women of the household. We argue that support of other women of the household can be pivotal for women's engagement in civic activities especially in cases when activities are communal in nature and whereby women of the household can participate together. Importantly, support of other women of the household has the potential to offset the negative effects of lack of support of men, which has been documented to lower women's political engagement. Fielding a novel civic engagement conjoint combined with a priming experiment to 767 women in Guatemala, a patriarchal society with entrenched gender norms and multi generational patrilocality, we show that women are more likely to prefer engaging in civic activities supported by women relative to having no support of men of the household. Importantly, we are able to show that this female-centric support is valued no differently than male support thereby, opening a potential avenue for increasing women's non-electoral political engagement by mobilizing women within the home. Additionally, we explore a source of heterogeneity by highlighting that this impact of support of other women of the household on civic engagement can be moderated by the perception of identity based victimization, conceptualized in terms of exposure to identity-based violence in particular intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization and the perception of prevalence of IPV.

Authors

• Shanze Fatima Rauf, University of Pennsylvania

• Erik M. Wibbels, University of Pennsylvania

• Diego José Romero, Utah State University