Women political participation index
| Quick info | |
|---|---|
| Data type | Numeric |
| Scale | Metric |
| Value labels | Not applicable |
| Technical name | polnat_politics_women_polpart |
| Category | Political factors |
| Label | Women political participation index |
| Related indicators | |
The "Women political participation index" is a V-Dem mid-level index capturing the extent of "to which women are descriptively represented in formal political positions" encompassing "the legislative presence of women and political power distribution by gender" (Sundström et al. 2017, 326). It ranges from low (0) to high (1).
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 itself is derived "by taking the average of the indicators for lower chamber female legislators (v2lgfemleg, standardized) and power distributed by gender (v2pepwrgen)" (Coppedge et al. 2025, 311) [note that variable names refer to V-Dem's nomenclature in their dataset, not in WeSIS]. 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
