Project Title: Female Political Participation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Principal Investigators:

  • Siwan Anderson (University of British Columbia)
  • Sophia Du Plessis (Stellenbosch University)
  • Sahar Parsa (Tufts University)
  • James Robinson (University of Chicago)

Supported by:

Objective

We seek to further the understanding of linkages between traditional gender institutions and contemporary rates of female political participation in Sub-Saharan Africa. To this end, we develop two distinct datasets that characterize both

  1. Traditional gender institutions for indigenous Sub-Saharan societies.
  2. Contemporary rates of female political participation and legislative representation across modern administrative sub-divisions.

This website contains a preview of the data collected as of February 2 2017. We intend to publicly distribute each dataset at a future date. See the Improving Data section for more details.

Datasets

The main contributions of this site are to (1) explain our research objectives and motivation and (2) describe the two datasets in detail as well as provide snapshots of the data prior to a wider release. Dataset previews are available in the Data section. Specifically:

  1. We provide a map and tabular summaries of the traditional gender institutions dataset.
  2. We provide a map of the contemporaneous female political participation dataset.

Traditional Gender Institutions

We characterize traditional gender institutions and customs for a set of societies and ethnic groups indigenous to Sub-Saharan Africa drawn from Murdock (1967)’s Ethnographic Atlas and Ethnolinguistic Map (Murdock 1959). We use a selection of variables from Murdock and White (1969) and follow a standardized coding procedure (Whyte 1978) to systematically encode qualitative information on traditional gender representation and participation in various societal roles from anthropological literary sources. In addition to encoding information from the literature, we develop a survey-based data collection approach to gather information on ethnic groups for which the literature is sparse. Among other traditional characteristics, the core measures of this dataset1 capture

  • The level of gender representation and access to political leadership roles
  • The level of gender representation and access to kinship or familial leadership roles
  • The presence or absence of solidarity or socialization groups for each gender

The final dataset includes categorically-encoded information for 320 societies. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to extend the coverage of several key variables from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample to a more geographically-dense set of ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. The traditional gender institutions mapping application provides a spatial visualization of each variable across the Ethnolinguistic Map of Murdock (1959).

Contemporaneous Female Political Participation

This database is the first of its kind to provide comprehensive and disaggregated information on female political participation at the local government level for sub-Saharan Africa. The database includes election data that has yet to be released in the public domain. The first iteration of the dataset covers local election results for 21 sub-Saharan African countries. The database aims to become the primary, centralized resource for local election data for sub-Saharan, African countries. The variables included in the dataset provide information about the following:

  • The existence of legislated quotas for women
  • The type of election system used
  • The names and gender of winning candidates
  • The total number of seats per administrative division
  • The number of seats won by females in each administrative division.

A full variable list as well as further information regarding the data collection and processing methodology are available on the Supplementary Information page. The contemporaneous female political participation mapping application provides a spatial visualization of the data across a map of national administrative divisions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Improving Data

We would greatly appreciate any help in completing the dataset! As of February 2 2017, we have collected data on 320 of 412 target Sub-Saharan ethnic groups in Murdock (1967). We have collected sub-national political data for the countries listed in Country Metafiles. There are several ways in which this project may benefit from your input.

Traditional Gender Institutions: To extend dataset coverage to as many of the 412 Sub-Saharan groups listed in the Ethnographic Atlas as possible, we are seeking data for groups listed here. We welcome any individuals able to give credible information on the traditional gender roles for any of these groups are invited to complete the project’s brief 10 - 15 minute survey. A French translation of the survey is also available.

Contemporary Female Political Participation: We seek to extend the geographic coverage of the contemporary female political participation as the lowest level of spatial aggregation possible. If you are able to assist with some of the missing regions in the map, we invite you to contact us at fppssa@gmail.com.

We sincerely thank any time or effort that can be devoted to improving the quality of both datasets.

Feedback

We welcome any comments, questions, other or feedback directed to fppssa@gmail.com.

References

Murdock, George Peter. 1959. Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History. McGraw-Hill.

———. 1967. “Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary.” Ethnology 6 (2). JSTOR:109–236.

Murdock, George Peter, and Douglas White. 1969. “Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.” Ethnology 8 (4). JSTOR:329–69.

Whyte, Martin King. 1978. “Cross-Cultural Codes Dealing with the Relative Status of Women.” Ethnology 17 (2). JSTOR:211–37.

  1. A detailed listing of each variable in the traditional institutions dataset is included in the Supplemental Information page.↩