Women Hold Up Half the Sky: A Comparative Analysis of Women’s Political Rights and Legal Systems from 1981- 2004

Abstract

We focus on the legal system to explain cross-national and temporal variance in women’s political rights. While women hold up half the sky, compared to alternative legal systems, we find that Common Law is correlated with less political rights for women. The concepts of political discontinuity and legal memory are central to our theoretical framework. Political discontinuity occurs in times of deep political disruptions, for instance during revolutionary periods. Whereas typically revolutions did not readily yield lasting improvements in women’s political rights, individual and systemic forms of legal memory meant that later progress towards political equality was facilitated. It is hard to overestimate the influence of legal systems on women’s rights around the world. Using available data for 148 countries from 1981-2004, we find that legal systems’ effect is robust to inclusion of more recent periods of upheaval, various model specifications and functional forms, disparate datasets and different outcome variables.