Date of Graduation

2011

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

The number of female political representatives is lower than the number of male representatives throughout the world. Several theories have been offered to account for the continuing deficiency in the number of women representatives in national legislatures, including approaches focused on cultural factors, social structure factors, economic characteristic factors, and political factors. More recent explanations have been made from two different points of view: supply side and demand side. Supply side arguments deal with institutional factors such as electoral systems and quota laws. Demand side arguments concentrate on the criteria used by the voters when evaluating candidates. This research investigates and focuses on demand side argument and uses Indonesia as a case study. As a comparison study, seven other selected Asian developing countries, such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, are chose. The purpose of the dissertation is described: to examine the factors that influence public opinion toward female representatives in developing nations and expand it further into the demand side theory of political participation. The study's focus and goal result in a new perspective of observing female representatives in developing nations and an interdisciplinary approach applying demand side theory and a combination of statistical methods. The research questions are comparisons related to the traditional and new ways of examining factors that influence public opinion toward female participation in politics, and utilize cultural, social structure, economic characteristics, and political variables to study electoral behavior and public opinion in developing nations. In terms of methodology and data, this dissertation applies ordered probit regression on the 2003 Indonesian public opinion survey data. As a comparison study, the chi-square analysis and data from World Values Survey are utilized based on different characteristics of the dependent variables. This dissertation is designed to develop further investigation of the factors that influence support for female representatives. The findings reaffirm the fact that Western scholars tend to make blanket statements about women and politics in developing Asian countries. Culture and religion go hand in hand in swaying public opinion toward female participation in politics. Education is a factor that could change the society to be more open toward female participation in politics and therefore there is a need to improve the education curricula so that it focuses more on political education. Although many theories have been proposed by Western scholars related to women and politics, this research is unique and give an interesting contribution to debates about the connection between the factors that influence public opinion toward female representatives and democracy. Moreover, this research fills a gap in the literature that has mainly focused on Western societies. Keywords: Female representative, public opinion, women and politics, political participation democracy, Asian developing countries. *The phrase is adapted from a feminist volume by Irigaray, L. (1985), “This Sex Which Is Not One.”.

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