Women political empowerment index
| Quick info | |
|---|---|
| Data type | Numeric |
| Scale | Metric |
| Value labels | Not applicable |
| Technical name | polnat_politics_women_empower |
| Category | Political factors |
| Label | Women political empowerment index |
| Related indicators | |
The "Women political empowerment index" is a V-Dem mid-level index capturing the extent of women’s political empowerment on three dimensions, namely civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation for women (Sundström et al. 2017, 322). It ranges from low (0) to high (1).
Conceptually, "[w]omen’s empowerment is defined as a process of increasing capacity for women, leading to greater choice, agency, and participation in societal decision-making [...] incorporat[ing] three equally-weighted dimensions: fundamental civil liberties, women’s open discussion of political issues and participation in civil society organizations, and the descriptive representation of women in formal political positions" (Coppedge et al. 2025, 310).
Coding rules
The index is composed of several components and lower-level indices applying V-Dem's measurement model (Pemstein et al. 2025) which in turn are indices built from a number of indicators. The index itsels is derived "by taking the average of women’s civil liberties index (v2x_gencl), women’s civil society participation index (v2x_gencs), and women’s political participation index (v2x_genpp)" (Coppedge et al. 2025, 310) [note that variable names refer to V-Dem's nomenclature in their dataset, not in WeSIS]. All indices range from 0 to 1, and all are based on point predictions from Bayesian factor analyses (BFA) (cf. Pemstein et al. 2025). For the exact index aggregation formula see Coppedge et al. 2025, Appendix A.
Bibliographic info
Citation: Sundström, Aksel, Pamela Paxton, Yi-ting Wang, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2017. "Women's Political Empowerment: A New Global Index, 1900-2012." World Development 94: 321–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.01.016
Related publications:- Dahlum, Sirianne, Carl H. Knutsen, and Valeriya Mechkova. 2022. “Women’s political empowerment and economic growth.” World Development 156: 105822. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105822
- Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2025. "V-Dem Codebook v15". Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
- Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2025. "The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data". V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 10th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.
Misc
Project manager(s): Nils Düpont (INF)
Data release:- Version 0.001: Initial release based on V-Dem v15
Revisions: No revisions yet
Sources
- Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2025. "V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v15" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds25
