Significant gender gaps in political participation have potentially negative implications for the framing of effective policy aimed at reducing gender inequality and improving women’s welfare. We study the drivers of women’s political participation and the effects of historic women’s political engagement on current gender gaps in political participation using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized fifteen years of archival records on taxes and prisons from 1921 to 1935, to first examine the effects of the 1929 Aba women’s tax revolt or “Women’s War”, one of the largest recorded historical instances of a large-scale female-led protest march, on rates of female incarceration resulting from the protests.
We combine data on female incarceration rates with Afrobarometer surveys from 2003 to 2014 to examine the effects of women’s participation in the revolts on political engagement of subsequent cohorts. The results show that for the cohort of women following the generation of women who would have participated in the revolts, there is a significant, strong positive relationship between female incarceration rates over the revolt period and community participation, voting and support for democracy. Women in the generations just post the revolts who come from areas with more revolt participation, as reflected in the female incarceration rate, are more likely to vote, participate in community political activities and express strong support for democracy.
The results shed light on the origins and drivers of women’s political participation, including both when and where political mobilization has been successful for women and the potential barriers to increased political participation, aimed at closing the gender gap in civic and political engagement. Nonso Obikili is an economist with research interests in African economic history, economic development and macroeconomics. Current research includes the long term effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trades on political and economic development in Africa. He was formerly a Lecturer at the State University of New York at Binghamton and is a regular contributor to various policy oriented think tanks in Nigeria.
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