QUALITY OF GOVERNMENT AS THE MISSING LINK BETWEEN POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT AND DURABLE PEACE?

Abstract

In 2000, United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, which recognised the different roles women play during and after an armed conflict had ended. This recognition led to a dramatic increase in academic work on the field, and during the same time, another field emerged. This field identified a correlation between a large number of women in parliaments and decreased level of corruption, and thereby government quality. This thesis aims to combine the research on women's political empowerment and quality of government to test whether the interaction can affect intrastate armed conflict relapse. The research question is the following: Is the effect of women's political empowerment on durable peace conditional on the quality of government? There are two theoretical motivations provided for, namely through government spending priorities and that women's political empowerment strengthens government quality, which decreases the risk of intrastate armed conflict relapse. I use a binary time-series cross-section method analysing the fixed-effect on 53 countries from 1984-2014. The results show a statistically significant correlation between the interaction of women's political empowerment and quality of government on intrastate armed conflict relapse. This means that the effect a high level of women’s political empowerment can have on the likelihood of a durable peace after an intrastate armed conflict is dependent on a high level of quality of government.