Fertility, Women's Political Empowerment, and Democracy: The Mediating Effects

• In Event: Democracy, Representation and Exclusion

Abstract

The two-way relationship between demography and democracy has been discussed from various perspectives, but the causal mechanism still needs to be examined. This article focuses on how fertility rate as a demography indicator could have a negative causal effect on democracy meditating by the political empowerment of women with the control of other social economic factors as well as covariation driven by year. This is especially significant in East Asia where the fertility rate dramatically decreased with the improvement of women's political status and democracy. Comparing countries over more than one hundred years and 130 countries, this research found how the decline in fertility rate has a positive impact on women’s civil liberties, women’s civil society participation, and women’s political participation, thus further improving the level of democracy. Using two-way fixed effect panel data and structural estimation model (SEM) with first-order autoregressive components for each equation and clustered by country, the study controls the effect of serial autocorrelation and reverse causality. Last, the robustness check with different databases could weaken the data limitations.

Author

• Yichun Si, Peking University