Replication Data for: Armed Conflict and Women’s Empowerment: Evidence from Two Natural Experiments

How does armed conflict affect women’s political empowerment? Recent studies have begun to focus on the impact of conflict on gender equality and women’s empowerment and find that armed conflict brought disproportional harms to women than men while also opening up windows of opportunities for women’s political empowerment, thereby facilitating their political participation in post-conflict periods. However, most existing studies concentrate on the macro, county-level explanations while ignoring how armed conflict affects women’s empowerment at the micro-level. Moreover, these studies are difficult to evaluate the causal effects of armed conflict on women’s empowerment due to their observational studies' nature. Leveraging two rebel attacks in Mali in 2008 as well as in Nigeria in 2012, respectively, this article examines the causal effects of armed conflict on the social support for women’s empowerment at the individual level. The fact that the two rebel attacks coincidentally occurred while the Afrobarometer was conducting nationally representative surveys in the two countries allows us to design two natural experiments that split respondents randomly into a control group surveyed before the attacks and a treatment group surveyed after the attacks. The statistical results show that the rebel attacks significantly increased respondents’ propensities to dislike their government’s current policy toward women’s empowerment and to exacerbate their perceptions of how women were unequally treated in their countries, which can in return increase to some extent the social support for policy reforms related to women’s empowerment. This article has important implications for the impact of conflict on women’s empowerment at the micro-level, thereby providing a linkage between micro-and macro-level studies. 近年来，学界开始关注武装冲突对性别平等和妇女赋权的影响。既有研究发现，武装冲突对女性造成了远超男性的伤害，但也为女性政治赋权创造了机会，在客观上促进了妇女的政治参与。然而，这些研究绝大部分集中在宏观的国家层面，缺乏微观层次上对武装冲突如何影响妇女赋权的关注。同时，由于大部分研究都是基于观察数据，难以准确评估武装冲突对妇女赋权的因果影响。2008年马里共和国和2012年尼日利亚分别爆发了武装袭击事件，而这两起武装袭击爆发的时机碰巧与“非洲晴雨表”正在两国进行的具有全国代表性的问卷调查的时间相吻合。利用这一特征可以构建两项自然实验，探究武装冲突在微观层次上对妇女赋权的社会支持基础的因果影响。统计分析发现，武装冲突在短期内显著地增加了受访者对于政府处理妇女赋权议题的不满程度，增强了民众对于本国妇女遭受不公正对待的感知，从而在一定程度上为推行提升妇女赋权的政策改革提供了社会支持基础。在微观层次上厘清冲突对于妇女赋权进程的影响，为连接宏观跨国层次的研究提供了一种新视角。