Sophie Hatte

(ENS Lyon)

will give a presentation on

Connecting the Unconnected: Facebook Access and Female Political Representation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: Can social media promote female access to political positions? Internet and social media have facilitated a number of evolutions regarding ideas, perceptions and attitudes towards women and their role in society. This paper focuses on the sub-Saharan African context, where female political under-representation is particularly salient, and which experienced a rising penetration of Facebook over the past decade. We build a novel panel dataset at the constituency-election level and exploit variation in the electoral outcomes observed across 8,162 races occurring in the context of 63 parliamentary elections in 17 countries. We leverage the staggered introduction of Facebook's Free Basics -i.e. free access to Facebook through partner mobile operators- across constituencies and time, and document the success of this connectivity shock and its subsequent effect on female political representation. We find that Facebook's Free Basics significantly fosters the election of female candidates, but only in the medium-run. This effect is driven by female candidates endorsed by the established political parties, and running for the first time. Finally, we uncover several mechanisms. Using survey data, we highlight a political demand mechanism: social media users, and especially the compliers of the Facebook access shock, have more favorable attitudes towards women and their presence in politics. Exploring the universe of Facebook posts of the candidates, we also document a political supply mechanism [work in progress]. Preliminary content analysis suggests gendered differences in online campaigning practices.

(with J. Loper and T. Taylor)