PE/PI Workshop: Susan Hyde (Berkeley)

Susan Hyde (Berkeley) will present, "Women's Group Empowerment Can Increase Political Participation: Evidence from Five Coordinated Field Experiments."
Abstract:
Non-electoral political participation, such as attending local meetings, contacting public officials, and making demands for public funds, is critical for leaders to effectively respond to the needs of marginalized groups. Yet, participation is unequal across different groups in society, with important consequences for distributional outcomes. This article presents a preregistered meta-analysis of five coordinated field experiments aimed at evaluating whether a popular theoretical model of collective action in social psychology can motivate women to engage more actively and effectively in non-electoral forms of political participation. We show that the intervention increased participation in a community grants program by an average of 13.7 points, with statistically significant and positive effects in four of five studies. We estimate that the treatment had demonstrable positive effects on the level of participation, the quality of participation, and responsiveness to women's policy goals in two of our five sites. Our analysis of mechanisms shows that the effects on our main outcomes could have been mediated by the mechanisms that directly follow from the women's empowerment intervention, but could also have been mediated by complementary processes that resulted from the training programs, such as self-efficacy, political knowledge, social , and shared policy priorities. We interpret this as evidence that this type of group empowerment intervention can increase political participation by marginalized groups beyond common informational treatments and encourage further research to better understand when it is more likely to be effective.