Reproducibility package for Empowering Change: Assessing the Role of Democracy, Civil Society, and Women’s Rights Groups in Advancing Legal Gender Equality

This paper explores the role that a country’s political economy, civil society organizations, and women’s rights groups play in advancing legal gender equality. Drawing on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law time-series data, which assesses women’s legal rights across eight domains of their lives, five decades, and 190 economies, the results reveal that higher levels of democracy and a more active civil society are positively associated with advances in legal equality between men and women. The analysis also reveals that, beyond an active civil society more broadly, women’s rights groups specifically are a key ingredient to successfully advance legal gender reforms. We show that both democracy and civil society play a more prominent role in removing legal restrictions that are placed upon women than they do in ensuring rights to enabling provisions such as the right to maternity leave, and that women’s rights groups seem particularly important in pushing the needle in this direction. Moreover, an active civil society may be more effective in advancing reform in more democratic countries, suggesting that bottom-up and top-down channels are more impactful when operating in tandem.