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The Long Shadow Cast by Communism over Women’s Political Representation: Evidence from Post-communist Countries
In this article, we appreciate the contested legacy of communism for women’s empowerment today, an issue that has not received much scholarly attention. On the one hand, under communism, women enjoyed the right to vote, initiate divorce, choose abortion, and enter the workforce and political positions. However, they enjoyed neither equal pay with men nor real influence upon high-profile political decisions. In the last two decades, women’s political representation has almost doubled, reaching 25%, mainly due to gender quotas (Clayton, 2021) and not least to democratization efforts (Lindberg, 2004; Moghadam, 2014), but some countries still experience low levels of women’s empowerment. For instance, according to Global Gender Gap Political Empowerment Subindex (2018), Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic are still way below the world median. These cases and world trends prove that we still lack a clear explanation about the factors determining this variation. For example, gender quotas exist in many states, but this institution’s effectiveness varies across countries. Many newly formed political parties in former communist states were forced to introduce gender quotas and implement them most effectively. Besides the voluntary quotas introduced by political parties, national gender quotas persisted in some countries, emulating communist practices in promoting women’s political empowerment; but the majority of the post-communist countries rejected the gender quotas system, including Russia.
We test the influence of the communist past on women’s political rights and gender equality using a comprehensive sample of 80 countries, 1991-2015, depending on data availability. The unit of analysis is country-year. Our primary dependent variable is the Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) index of women’s political rights. Therefore, we focus on the communist legacy (often overlooked in the literature) on women’s political empowerment today and argue that the communist past indirectly affects women’s political empowerment, overshadowing the positive effects of democratization and gender quotas. Our data and theory show that this is because during the transition to democracy, the institutions that were imposed by the states during the Soviet period to promote equality between the sexes, such as state-forced women’s liberalization and infamous gender quotas, were rejected by the majority of politicians and their constituents, primarily due to the association with the communist past and perceived ineffectiveness of the communist practices and institutions. Coupled with the conservative backlash in many post-communist countries, the communist legacy impedes progress in empowering women politically. We show empirically that the communist past reverses the positive effect of democratization and gender quotas on women’s political empowerment: all else equal, democracy and gender quotas are negatively associated with women’s political empowerment in former communist countries but positively associated in countries that never experienced communism. Our results are robust to different model specifications and alternative explanations.