Modernization Theory: How to Measure and Operationalize it When Gauging Variation in Women’s Representation?

Modernization theory, one of the most influential theories in the social sciences, holds that as the composition of the economy develops, from an agrarian to a postindustrial society, communities will develop post-materialist values, which should lead to a higher representation of women in elected positions. However, while this reasoning is intuitive, there is no consensus on how to operationalize and measure this process. Existing studies use different types of national level proxy measures such as aggregated survey data on public attitudes on gender equality and broad development indicators such as per capita GDP or population density. In this article, we not only highlight that existing strategies are suboptimal as they run the risk of creating ecological inference fallacies for the former type of indicators and measurement error for the second type of factors, but also offer some finer grained operationalization of modernization theory at the regional level. In more detail, we illustrate that modernization is a multifaceted concept, which is primarily characterized by urbanization, women’s increased labor force participation and a strengthening of the tertiary sector. Using an original dataset on 285 European regions we illustrate that any of these three characteristics of modernization has an independent impact on women’s representation.