Building on my first book, this book project examines how women improve substantive representation and make policy changes in authoritarian regimes using the case of China. Female legislators have consistently held about 20% of seats in the National People's Congress (NPC) in China, but they sponsor about 44% of all legislative bills and more than half of all bills relevant to women's rights and interests in the 12th NPC. Among sponsors, women on average sponsor more bills (4.8 bills) than men (3.1 bills). The working paper documents these patterns, examines why women are more productive than men, and suggests that women have distinctive policy interests. In the larger book project, I propose structural-, group-, and grassroots-level factors that are conducive to increasing women's substantive representation in autocracies. In the talk, I will focus on the group-level factors and show how women strategically collaborate with regime insiders to advance their policy agenda and how women leaders encourage women's political participation using observational quantitative data, case studies, and interview evidence.
Yue Hou is the Janice and Julian Bers assistant professor in the Social Sciences in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania. During 2022-23, She is a visiting scholar at Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. Her research interests include political economy, authoritarian politics, and identity politics, with a regional focus on China. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in the Journal of Politics, Journal of Experimental Political Science, Political Science Research and Methods, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Journal of Comparative Economics, among other peer-reviewed journals. Some of her work has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Review, the Economist, and South China Morning Post. Her first book, the Private Sector in Public Office: Selective Property Rights in China (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2019), addresses the long-standing puzzle of how China’s private sector manages to grow without secure property rights. She received her PhD in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and BA in Economics and Mathematics from Grinnell College.
Remarks
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