A. Jordan Nafa • University of North Texas
While scholars have long recognized the role of descriptive representation and the politics of presence in shaping individuals’ attitudes towards social and political institutions, few studies have examined the impact of descriptive representation on citizens’ support for democracy as a system of government and their willingness to reject non-democratic alternatives. Drawing on theories of political socialization, institutional learning, and political backlash, this article examines the degree to which symbolic female representation in government shapes the attitudinal dimension of democratic consolidation. Leveraging five waves of the Integrated Values Survey across sixty-three countries between 1995 and 2020, I estimate a series of societal growth curve models and employ Bayesian Model Averaging to adjudicate between competing theoretical explanations.
Text and figures: All prose and images are licensed under Creative Commons (CC-BY-4.0).
Code: All code is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.