Women’s Inclusion and Political Violence

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 explores the connection between women’s (political) inclusion and political violence. The chapter starts out by conceptualizing women’s inclusion and developing a measure for it using the kind of model described in Chapter 2. The rest of the chapter is focused on theorizing about the connection between women’s inclusion and interstate war, intrastate conflict, repression, and terrorism. These arguments can be usefully grouped into two types. The first group of arguments has to do with the idea that women as individuals or as a group tend to behave in certain ways or have particular preferences that differ in systematic ways from men. A second group of arguments focus on the how perceived stereotypes about women who are included in public spaces affects the behavior of political actors. The results show that women’s inclusion in political spaces is negatively correlated with terrorist attacks.