Rewarding Women’s Rights in Dictatorships

How can dictatorships signal democratic progress to international audiences? Cross-national research indicates that democracies are more likely to receive foreign aid, but we lack an understanding of how particular policies undertaken by dictatorships are perceived by the international actors that craft and implement development programs. We theorize women's rights as a policy area in which autocrats can advance democratic norms without risking their political survival, in contrast to other more costly reforms to the electoral sphere. We implement a conjoint survey experiment on an international “elite” sample of 108 professionals in the development field. Our design allows us to assess how policies related to (a) electoral competition, (b) women's economic rights, and (c) women's political representation influence perceptions of democracy and willingness to provide foreign aid. We find that reforms related to opposition parties have a large impact on the perceived level of democracy and on foreign aid provision, but, strikingly, that increasing women's economic rights is also highly effective. Legislative gender quotas exhibit a significant (though smaller) effect on perceived democracy, but do not increase the likelihood of receiving a foreign aid package. Taken together, our findings indicate that international development professionals espouse a broad, egalitarian conception of democracy, and that autocrats accordingly enjoy considerable leeway in how they may seek to burnish their international reputations.