WINGOs as conduits of world culture, their relationships with emancipative values, and women’s political empowerment worldwide, 1981–2020

Women’s International Non-Governmental Organizations (WINGOs) are a major force in spreading world culture at the national level. At the same time, women’s political empowerment is one of the spaces in which world culture manifests itself. WINGOs, often in conjunction with emancipative values, may potentially have an impact on a country’s level of women’s political empowerment. However, scholars rarely integrate them into theory and empirical tests. Using the world culture approach as the larger frame, I build this framework and test it. Specifically, Hypothesis 1 tests whether there is a potential positive association between women’s political empowerment and the number of WINGO ties. Hypothesis 2 examines the potential interaction between emancipative values and WINGOs. Employing mixed-effects linear regression on the aggregated World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS) dataset and administrative data, I observe that WINGOs and emancipative values have separate effects on women’s political empowerment. However, there is no significant evidence that emancipative values interact with WINGOs.