Closing gender voting gap in Pakistan requires reaching men

Canvassing campaigns aimed at increasing women's political participation in developing countries with patriarchal gender norms are more likely to succeed when they target men as well as women, according to a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Sarah Khan. The study, published in the journal American Political Science Review , is based on a field experiment conducted in Lahore, Pakistan in which researchers tested the efficacy of a nonpartisan canvassing campaign conducted by Pakistani civil society organizations, Aurat Foundation and South Asia Partnership-Pakistan, to increase women's turnout in the July 2018 national elections. The experiment showed that canvassing only women had no effect on their turnout in the election, while households where both men and women were canvassed had the largest increases in women voting and in men's willingness to help them cast ballots. " Efforts to close the gender voting gap tend to focus on women, but this approach may not be effective in patriarchal settings where men act as their households' gatekeepers, exerting varying levels of control over women's participation in the public sphere," said Khan, an assistant professor of political science in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Our study suggests that interventions in such settings aimed at increasing women's participation in the political process should take these household dynamics seriously and engage with men as well as women." Co-authors of the study, in addition to Khan, were Ali Cheema of the Lahore University of Management Sciences and the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, Shandana Khan Mohmand of the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom, and Asad Liaqat, research scientist at Meta, formerly known as Facebook Inc.