Women's Group Empowerment Can Increase Political Participation: Evidence from Five Coordinated Field Experiments

Non-electoral political participation, such as attending local meetings, contacting public officials, and making demands for public funds, is critical for leaders to effectively respond to the needs of marginalized groups. Yet, participation is unequal across different groups in society, with important consequences for distributional outcomes. This article presents a preregistered meta-analysis of five coordinated field experiments aimed at evaluating whether a psychological empowerment intervention inspired by a theoretical model of collective action in social psychology can motivate women to engage more actively and effectively in non-electoral forms of political participation. We show that the intervention increased participation in a community grants program as well as on survey self-reports in multiple sites. Participation quality and elite responsiveness to women’s participation also increased in two out of five sites. The effects of the interventions may have been mediated by increased efficacy beliefs and procedural knowledge. We interpret this as evidence that this type of psychological group empowerment intervention can increase political participation by marginalized groups beyond common informational treatments and encourage further research to better understand when it is more likely to be effective.