Does Gender Equality Matter? The Effect Of Gender Equality On Protest Campaign Success

The study finds that higher levels of women's political empowerment are positively associated with the success of nonviolent resistance campaigns and negatively associated with the success of violent campaigns. Using the NAVCO 2.1 dataset and the Women's Political Empowerment Index (WPEI), the author argues that gender equality shapes both the societal norms regarding the legitimacy of violence and the opportunity structures for recruitment. While the results for nonviolent campaigns are robust across various specifications, the findings for violent campaigns are more sensitive to how time dependency is handled. The author concludes that gender-related dynamics are critical structural elements in understanding the outcomes of collective action.

• There is a positive significant relationship between women's political empowerment and the likelihood of nonviolent campaign success.
• There is a negative significant relationship between women's political empowerment and the success of violent resistance campaigns.
• The effect of women's political empowerment on campaign success differs significantly based on the primary tactic used, as shown by a significant interaction term in the logit model (p < 0.001).
• The author hypothesises that gender inequality promotes violent campaigns by fostering norms of 'militarised masculinities' and creating a 'male surplus' that eases recruitment for armed groups.
• Gender equality is theorised to increase nonviolent success by promoting norms of mutual respect and expanding the mobilisation pool to include more women.
• The Women's Political Empowerment Index (WPEI) is a more effective predictor of campaign success than other proxies such as fertility rates, literacy ratios, or infant mortality.
• Individual subcomponents of the WPEI (civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation) do not show statistically significant effects on their own, suggesting that empowerment operates as a multidimensional macro-concept.
• The model for nonviolent campaign success is robust across different specifications, but the model for violent campaign success is sensitive to the method used to handle time dependency.
• The inclusion of WPEI improves the predictive power of the models, though out-of-sample generalisability for nonviolent campaigns remains poor (AUC < 0.70).
• The study found no evidence of selection bias that would invalidate the use of a single-stage logistic regression model for the main analysis.

APA

Einen, B. (2022). Does Gender Equality Matter? The Effect Of Gender Equality On Protest Campaign Success. Peace Research Institute Oslo. https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/364073cc-fc3c-46df-8f5e-765628d74bb6/Birthe_Einen Master Thesis 2022.pdf?inline=true

Chicago

Einen, Birthe. Does Gender Equality Matter? The Effect Of Gender Equality On Protest Campaign Success. Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2022. https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/364073cc-fc3c-46df-8f5e-765628d74bb6/Birthe_Einen Master Thesis 2022.pdf?inline=true.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Einen |first1=Birthe |title=Does Gender Equality Matter? The Effect Of Gender Equality On Protest Campaign Success |publisher=Peace Research Institute Oslo |date=2022 |url=https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/364073cc-fc3c-46df-8f5e-765628d74bb6/Birthe_Einen Master Thesis 2022.pdf?inline=true |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{einen2022does, author = {Einen, Birthe}, title = {{Does Gender Equality Matter? The Effect Of Gender Equality On Protest Campaign Success}}, institution = {Peace Research Institute Oslo}, year = {2022}, url = {https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/364073cc-fc3c-46df-8f5e-765628d74bb6/Birthe_Einen Master Thesis 2022.pdf?inline=true}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }