Ancestral irrigation and women's political empowerment

Kyklos • Vol/Iss. 79(2) • John Wiley & Sons Ltd. • • Published In • Pages: 377-398 •
By Ezcurra, Roberto

Abstract

This article evaluates an ancestral history of irrigation as a negative predictor of political empowerment afforded to women. The author measures the ancestral irrigation levels on a per-country basis by tracking the ethnic backgrounds of each country's population and calculating the percentage of the population that has a history of irrigation agriculture. The author finds a significant association between higher rates of ancestral irrigation and a lower index of women's empowerment. As a potential explanation, the author proposes that higher rates of collectivism present in communities that used irrigation led to women's issues being disparaged. To further expand on this explanation, the author investigates and finds a negative correlation between ancestral irrigation and modern indexes of democracy, economic individualism, and cultural individualism. To demonstrate the cultural transmission of attitudes towards women as based on ancestral irrigation, the author evaluates male dominance in oral traditions of cultures with or without irrigation, then correlates attitudes of second generation immigrants in Europe towards women with their parent's ancestral irrigation histories.

Samples

Sample Used Coded Data Comment
Ethnologue: Languages of the World
Polity IV DatabasePolity2 Democracy Index
Geo-Referencing of Ethnic Groups (GREG)
Women's Political Empowerment Index (WPEI)From Sundström et al. 2017
Gridded Population of the World (GPW)Version not described
Economic Freedom of the World IndexFrom the Heritage FoundationEdition not described
Individualism-Impersonal Psychology ScaleFrom Schulz et al. 2019

Hypotheses (5)

HypothesisSupported
Ancestral history of irrigation in a country's population predicts lower levels of political empowerment for women when controlling for geographic controls, ethnographic controls, timing of neolithic transition, and region fixed effects.Supported
Ancestral history of irrigation in a country's population predicts lower levels of political empowerment for women.Supported
Ancestral history of irrigation in a country's population predicts lower levels of democracy for that country.Supported
Ancestral history of irrigation in a country's population predicts lower levels of economic freedom for that country.Supported
Ancestral history of irrigation in a country's population predicts lower levels of individualism in that country's population.Supported
Documents and Hypotheses Filed By: alex.knickrehm