Before establishing the relationships between female leadership and political outcomes, we discuss the findings of the literature on women in politics and the Chinese context, and then, we provide the theoretical framework of this study.
Women in Politics
Although women are still underrepresented at senior levels in both the public and economic sectors, there are currently more female leaders globally than at any other time in history. This dramatic change has drawn attention from economists, managers, policy analysts, and other social scientists who aim to understand the implications of women in public appointments. Classic political science theory suggests that there will be no changes in policy once a woman takes office, since all politicians care only about winning elections (e.g., Downs, 1957). Democracy and median voters force women and men to the center of policy spaces and offer similar platforms. In this case, the impact of gender should not matter since women and men need to cater to the preferences of median voters. This argument is supported by some empirical studies. For example, Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) used a dataset of U.S. mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005 and found no effect of mayors’ gender on policy outcomes related to the size of the local government, the composition of municipal spending and employment, or crime rates. However, other research evidence suggests that gender does matter in political leadership.
Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) used political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women’s leadership on policy and decision making; they found that an increase in female participation resulted in increased expenditures in areas such as public investments in providing clean water. Chattopadhyay and Duflo’s research is echoed by similar studies that found that female politicians affect policy outcomes regarding education (Beaman et al., 2012; Clots-Figueras, 2012), healthcare (Besley and Case, 2003), forest conservation (Leone, 2019), and child-related spending (Clots-Figueras, 2012). These results suggest that the contexts in which women function in terms of political leadership influence the impact of gender on policy and political outcomes. In India, for example, clean drinking water is important to the needs of both adults and their children. Female leaders are often more knowledgeable about areas related to childcare and thus devote themselves to providing clean water to gain votes from other women.
For the most part, however, this existing literature only examines the performance of women in democratic societies and is limited to electoral politics. We know little about the impact of women in leadership roles in nondemocratic societies, such as China. In the next sections, we first introduce the Chinese context and then propose a theory of female leadership that connects role congruity and female leaders’ impact on political outcomes.
The State’s Different Goals and Female Leaders in China
Since its reform and opening up in 1978, China’ development strategy has focused on economic development. As part of the market reform, the central government has built an effective state bureaucracy to bolster economic growth (Li, 1998; Bo, 2004). In this system, the central government makes short- and long-term development plans and allows local governments to compete with one another for resources and prosperity. This strategy has enabled China to evolve over the past four decades from a marginal economic player to the second-largest economy in the world. Economic development is an imperative goal for the government (Choi, 2012; Zhou, 2007). In fact, as such an important government objective, economic growth even comes at the cost of rising social inequality, environmental pollution, and corruption (Nie, Jiang, and Wang, 2013). The campaign for “Building a Harmonious Socialist Society” of former President Hu Jingtao in 2004 demonstrates that the state has come to consider maintaining social stability as important as sustaining economic growth (Wang, 2015). The state bureaucracy has established development goals and evaluation and promotion criteria for government leaders, who are held accountable for implementing the state’s dual goals. Government leaders’ performance is evaluated through the following three categories of indicators: hard targets, which refer to economic indicators, such as the GDP growth rate; soft targets, which include social welfare indicators, such as improving education, providing health care, and alleviating environmental damage; and targets with veto power, which are political tasks, including maintaining social stability (Edin, 2003). Hard targets are the most important factors that determine Chinese government leaders’ career development within the bureaucracy. In contrast, soft targets are difficult to quantify and are not immediately related to career advancement; therefore, they usually receive less attention from government leaders (Zhou, 2010: 19; Wu et al., 2013).
The Chinese government's emphasis on social issues has largely coincided with the rise in female political participation. Figure 1 represents the number of female secretaries and mayors. In the 1990s, there were few female leaders in the Chinese government, and the female leadership ratio was less than 1 percent in the early 1990s. The Program for the Development of Chinese Women (1995–2000) set out well-defined goals relating to women’s participation in government and politics; among these goals were, by the end of the twentieth century, a minimum of one female member in the core leadership teams of party and government organizations at the municipal level. The Chinese central government also declared from 2001 to 2005 that the leading groups of prefectures should contain at least one female member, and the deployment of female cadres should be prioritized in the departments of education, science and technology, culture, health, sports, civil affairs, labor and social security, which are related to the state’s soft targets (Organization Department of the Central Committee of CPC, 2001). In 2006, the Chinese government held a national forum on training and selecting female cadres, which gives preference to selecting and appointing female cadres when they are equally qualified in other aspects. The number of female leaders increased annually after these policies were established. Figure 2 shows the increasing number of female secretaries and mayors at the prefectural level; twice as many women have been elected to leadership positions within prefectures since 2006. This pattern conforms to the data from the Organization Department of the CCP Central Committee. In 2009, at the prefecture (director-general) level, female cadres accounted for 13.7 percent of the total number of cadres at the same level (United Nations, 2012). In fact, at all levels of government, there is typically a female leader in charge of science, education, culture and health, which are sectors that are relevant to the state’s soft targets. For example, Vice Premier Sun Cunlan is currently responsible for handling the COVID-19 pandemic in China.
Although the state has a history of assigning female cadres to fulfil its social development goals, it is still not certain whether female leaders are effective in implementing this state goal and whether they pay sufficient attention to soft targets. We do not know whether the extant findings regarding female leaders in other countries and their concerns about “women’s issues”, such as clean drinking water, education, and forest conservation, are also relevant in China (e.g., Besley and Case 2003; Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Thomas, 1991; Thomas and Welch, 2001).
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The Institutional Approach and Role Theory
Prior studies have pointed out that government leaders may balance the state’s multiple goals differently based on their political incentives at different career stages (Wang and Luo, 2019); however, we do not know whether there is a gender effect on how government leaders implement the state’s goals. The institutional approach emphasizes that organizations can constrain decision makers. Guy Peters (2000) defines an institution as “a formal or informal, structural, societal or political phenomenon that transcends the individual level, that is based on more or less common values, has a certain degree of stability and influences behavior” (18). The routines, procedures, conventions, organizational forms and technologies in institutions all offer and constrain behavior alternatives and to a certain extent, shape and guide individual behaviors (March and Olsen, 1989). This means that males and females who occupy the same leadership roles defined by their specific position in a hierarchy would behave very similarly when then there are strong organizational constraints (Peters, 2000).
Leaders not only occupy roles defined by their position in an organization but also simultaneously function under the constraints of their gender role. Research in a natural setting found that although some gender-stereotypic differences vanish under the influence of an organizational role, others do not vanish (Moskowitz, Suh, and Desaulniers, 1994). Despite pressures to conform to institutional routines and norms, gender roles often exert some influence, with the result that males and females with the same organizational role may behave somewhat differently. Research associated with female leadership emphasizes the “feminine” qualities of cooperation, listening, caring, communication, and knowledge sharing (e.g., Book, 2000; Eagly and Carli, 2003; Ali and Kulik, 2014). Such female leadership styles are increasingly important for building, opening, and sharing internal environments that are conducive to high-quality decision making and the recognition of strategic opportunities in contemporary organizations (e.g., Adams and Ferreira, 2009; Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Helfat and Martin, 2015; Huang and Kisgen, 2013). According to role theory (Eagly and Karau, 2002), females have a communal gender role but not a very agentic role, and males have an agentic role but not a communal role. Communal characteristics primarily relate to a concern for the welfare of other people, while agentic characteristics primarily describe an assertive, confident and dominating tendency. Organizational behaviors include many actions. The selective and discretionary aspects of organizational behaviors are most likely subject to a gender effect.
Female leadership and economic growth. China’s GDP growth rate fluctuated but remained high from 1995 to 2015. This favorable macroeconomic environment provides a good context to test local governors’ effectiveness. For local Chinese governments, economic growth represents the main metric to assess officials (Choi, 2012; Zhou, 2007). Because of the fiscal decentralization and political centralization since 1978, the GDP competition among local Chinese governments has induced local officials to focus mainly on economic development (Xu, 2011). The government plays an important role in economic growth through activities such as providing fiscal incentives, introducing industrial policies, and creating favorable business environments (e.g., Jensen, 2008; Dollery and Wallis, 2001). Leaders’ roles in leading economic development should be of primary importance in the government, because these roles endow them with legitimate authority and are regulated by clear rules and norms. It is likely that leadership roles in leading economic development provide many norms about how tasks should be performed. Institutional constraints should be strong here since achieving economic development goals represents the hard targets in leaders’ performance evaluation and regard system within the bureaucracy (Zhou, 2010: 19; Wu et al., 2013). Having a leading role in local economic development means that both male and female leaders need to play an organizational role that involves activities such as striving for support from upper-level government (Zhou, 2006), attracting foreign direct investment (Tung and Cho, 2000; Wang, Zhang, and Qin, 2007), and mobilizing local companies to invest (Liu et al., 2019). In line with our argument that the influence of gender roles can be diminished or even eliminated with strong institutional pressures, the gender-stereotypic differences should disappear when males and females play their organizational role in leading economic development. Therefore, from an institutional perspective, we have our first hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1
There is no direct relationship between female leadership and local economic growth.
Female Leadership and Social Policy. Economic development is of primary importance to the Chinese government, therefore, it is unsurprising that the institutional constraints are sufficiently strong to transcend the impact of individual factors such as gender when leaders play their organizational role in leading economic development. The bureaucracy has a clear performance and reward system related to economic development. In contrast, social development is difficult to quantify and is not immediately related to government officials’ career advancement; thus, social development usually receives less attention from government leaders. Despite increasing pressure to emphasize social development from the central government, local Chinese governors generally have some leeway to vary the extent to which they carry out the required activities. For example, Nie, Jiang, and Wang, (2013) found evidence that local government officials took risks of failing to maintain social stability when coping with coalmine accidents. In addition, unlike their counterparts in democratic countries, Chinese governors do not need to respond to voters, which means that they have greater discretion in regard to social policy. This discretionary part of organizational behavior is likely subject to the gender effect. The influence of gender roles occurs not only because people respond to a leader with gender stereotypic expectation but also because most people have internalized gender roles to some extent (Lafferty, Phillipson, and Jacobs, 2019; Conry-Murray, 2015; Wood, et al., 1997). As a result, males and females may form different social identities and different role perceptions in an organizational setting.
According to role theory, people attribute more communal characteristics, such as helpfulness, concern for others, kindness and gentleness, to females (Eagly and Karau, 2002). Females’ preferences are more related to promoting social development. Empirical results have also found that women desire more social services to substitute for their reduced production within the home (Cavalcanti and Tavares, 2011). Studies about female state legislators have found a positive relationship between gender ratios and the propensity of introducing or passing bills concerning “women-related issues” (e.g., Thomas, 1991; Berkman and O’Connor, 1993; Thomas and Welch, 2001). In addition, having more women in decision-making positions increases female policy makers’ responses to female residents’ complaints, such as complaints that concern clean drinking water (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004), education (Clots-Figueras, 2012), health spending (Rehavi, 2007), and forest conservation (Leone, 2019). Although it is understood that female leadership has some impact on social policy, none of these studies were conducted with data on local governments in China; therefore, it is not clear how these findings can be extrapolated from democratic countries to a nondemocratic setting with a leader’s high discretionary power and no pressure from voters. Drawing on role theory and the empirical studies conducted in other countries, we expect that female leadership will influence the government to make more effort to develop social policy.
Therefore, we formulate our second hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2
There is a positive relationship between female leadership and social development.