Gender and climate change: Do female parliamentarians make difference?
Introduction
Climate change is a serious threat, and it demands prompt policy response (Stern, 2008). Political commitment to address the issue is critical, yet sources of large differences in such commitments across countries are not fully uncovered. This paper focuses on the relevance of political identity, and in particular, the gender of politicians. We ask whether representation of females in political decision-making contributes to climate change policy action around the world.
That politician's gender identity may have implications for policy outcomes has been established in the literature. Studies have shown that female political representation contributes to significant changes in domestic and international policies including higher spending on health (Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras, 2014; Mavisakalyan, 2014) and education (Svaleryd, 2009; Clots-Figueras, 2012), more laws and expenditures relevant to female needs (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004; Clots-Figueras, 2011), higher disbursements of foreign aid (Hicks et al., 2015, 2016). Furthermore, female politicians have been associated with outcomes such as better quality of institutions (Dollar et al., 2001; Swamy et al., 2001) and higher rates of economic growth (Jayasuriya and Burke, 2013). While the existing studies on the determinants of climate change policies across countries have highlighted the relevance of countries' formal and informal institutions (Fredriksson and Neumayer, 2013; Fredriksson and Wollscheid, 2015; Ang and Fredriksson, 2017; Mavisakalyan et al., 2018), to the best of our knowledge the role of politicians' identity has not received dedicated attention in this literature.
Gender differences in attitudes towards climate change identified in the general public suggest that females have greater awareness and concern about climate change than males do (McCright, 2010; McCright and Dunlap, 2011). Based on theories of gender socialisation, these differences can be linked to differences in values and social expectations conferred through socialization whereby cooperation and carefulness - values relevant for climate change action - are more emphasized in females than in males (Gilligan, 1982; Beutel and Marini, 1995). Gender differences in climate change concern can also be linked to differences in social roles performed in the society with production of climate change seen to be more closely linked to activities performed by males than females (Spitzner, 2009). Furthermore, consequences of climate change are likely to be gender-differentiated as well, with females more disproportionately bearing the costs of climate change due to their ‘gendered labour and care roles and social status’ (Seager et al., 2016, p.13).
In ‘citizen candidates’ models, in the absence of complete political commitment, politicians implement policies consistent with their preferences (Osborne and Slivinski, 1996; Besley and Coate, 1997). However, it is unclear whether we should expect to observe gender differences in preferences of politicians similar to those observed in the general public. Indeed, it is possible that females who pursue leadership roles in a predominantly male environment are similar to males (Adams and Funk, 2012). Consistent with this proposition, Sundstrom and McCright (2014) do not find robust evidence for gender differences in environmental concerns among Swedish parliamentarians although such gender differences are observed in the general public in Sweden. In the context of the US, however, Fredriksson and Wang (2011) find that female parliamentarians in the House of Representatives have more pro-environmental views compared to their male counterparts. Building on these observations, our study evaluates the implications of female representation in politics for climate change policies adopted by countries around the world.
From an econometric perspective, we are confronted with a problem of omitted variables: adoption of climate change policies and election of females to parliament may both be the product of underlying characteristics of countries we do not observe. We employ two key strategies to ascertain that our estimates are not driven by confounding factors. First, we use an instrumental variable based on countries' history of female political empowerment and estimate a 2SLS model. Second, we use a partial identification approach proposed by Oster (2016). The main idea of this approach is to study how large would the amount of selection on unobservables need to be, relative to the amount of selection on observables, to explain away the entire casual effect of female representation.
Based on a large sample of countries, we document a robust positive association between female representation in a country's parliament and the stringency of its climate change policies. The impact we identify is statistically significant and economically meaningful. As an illustration, our 2SLS estimation results imply that lifting the female representation in Bahrain, a country where females comprised just over 2% of parliamentarians in the study period, to the level of Denmark, a country with over 37% female representation, could lead to a 6-fold increase in the stringency of the country's climate change policies (in practice Denmark's climate change policies are around 8 times as stringent as Bahrain's). In extended results, we further demonstrate that through its effects on the stringency of climate change policies, female parliamentary representation results in lower carbon dioxide emissions.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. The next section describes the data used in the study. This is followed by a discussion of our empirical approach and the results of baseline analysis in section 3. In section 4 we test the sensitivity of the results to the choice of control and dependent variables, and functional form, while section 5 is dedicated to addressing the issue of endogeneity employing instrumental variable and partial identification approaches. We extend the analysis to study the implications of female representation for carbon dioxide emissions in section 6. The final section concludes.
Section snippets
Data
We assemble a dataset for a sample of up to 91 countries based on various sources. Table 1 specifies the sources and presents summary statistics for the variables used in the baseline analysis.
Our measure of climate change policies is Climate Laws, Institutions and Measures Index (CLIMI) derived by Steves et al. (2011) based on the 2005–2010 annual national communications to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and used in other published studies (e.g.,
Baseline results
To evaluate the baseline effect of the proportion of females in parliament on climate change policy of country i, we estimate the following model using ordinary least squares (OLS):where FemParliamenti is the proportion of females in a country's parliament, Xi is a vector of controls for economic and institutional characteristics of countries defined in section 2, and ɛi is a disturbance term.
The OLS estimates of equation (1) are presented in Table 2.
Additional controls
We have established a positive and statistically significant relationship between female representation in parliament and the stringency of climate change policies across countries. Yet, the possibility that female representation simply acts as a marker of unobserved characteristics of countries cannot be ruled out at this stage of the analysis. To mitigate this possibility, we control for additional variables that could be correlated with the unexplained component of CLIMI. The results of this
Employing an instrument
The previous sections have established a rather robust statistically significant positive relationship between female representation in parliament and the stringency of climate change policies across countries. However, whether this finding can be given a causal interpretation can be questioned because of unobserved heterogeneity: places that are different for a variety of unobserved reasons will differ in their political representation of females as well as in their climate change policy
Implications for emissions
Female parliamentary representation appears to be a significant factor in explaining climate change policies across countries. Here we ask whether this finding has implications for actual outcomes: do the policy changes associated with female representation result in lower carbon dioxide emissions? To explore these relationships, we estimate the equations (1), (4) jointly with the following equation determining carbon dioxide emissions, using 3SLS:where CO2i
Conclusion
The lack of political commitment to address climate change around the world warrants an inquiry into underlying sources. In this paper, we have asked whether the lack of female political representation may be one such source. Our results confirm that this is the case: female representation in national parliaments leads to more stringent climate change policies across countries, and by doing so, it results in lower carbon dioxide emissions.
The results of this study have important policy
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