The current global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented global health crisis and propelled nations into new poverty crises, jeopardizing hard-won development gains in the world’s most vulnerable countries. These twin public health and poverty crises in low-income countries are intimately connected to policy domains that tend to be prioritized by women citizens and politicians: public health and poverty alleviation. In this project, we ask what happens when a global crisis suddenly shifts global attention towards issues historically prioritized by women. More specifically, this project explores the pandemic’s impacts on (1) the presence of women in political decision-making (descriptive representation) and on (2) the policy priorities and legislative behavior of men and women political leaders (substantive representation) in low-income countries. To address these issues, we use an innovative and ambitious mixed-method approach. We propose five separate studies, including quantitative analyzes of changes in women's numeric representation and budget allocations in low-income countries, analyses of legislative speech data from thirteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a comparative case study of Malawi and Zimbabwe, and survey experiments with citizens in these two countries to gauge how citizens' demands for women politicians have been affected by the pandemic.
In a wide variety of male-dominated political contexts, research has found evidence of gender stereotypes and masculine coded leadership ideals, which appear to undermine women’s perceived suitability as well as their authority as top political leaders. Yet, knowledge is lacking on how and under what conditions political leadership ideals become less masculine-coded, and how that would affect women leaders in practice. Despite women’s increasing political representation worldwide, political leadership and gender has to date mostly been studied in heavily male-dominated contexts. Knowledge needs to be updated on leadership ideals and the conditions facing women political leaders in more gender-balanced contexts. This project contributes to filling this gap through a series of studies on leadership ideals and conditions for exercising leadership in Swedish politics using interviews and surveys with politicians, a survey experiment, and quantitative text analysis of parliamentary instruments for scrutiny of ministers. Taking existing theory as our starting point, we examine how leadership ideals are constructed in a gender balanced context and what implications that has for men’s and women’s political leadership in practice. The project contributes knowledge about a largely unstudied question of high relevance for democracy: to what extent do conditions for women improve as male dominance in politics decreases.