Edmund Malesky shares preliminary findings from Metaketa study on women’s group empowerment
The professor of political economy presented the research at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences Annual Meeting.
Recognizing the global gender gap in women’s non-electoral participation and a need for interventions that improve government responsiveness and increase disadvantaged groups' participation, a team of researchers conducted a Metaketa study exploring if women’s group empowerment can increase political participation.
The research initiative assesses the impact of women’s action committees (WACs) on political participation in Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malawi and Kyrgyzastan. It looked to increase women's political participation by providing informational resources and facilitating exercises to break down the social-psychological barriers to political participation.
Funded by Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), the Metaketa model evaluates interventions across multiple contexts to understand under what conditions they work best.
Edmund Malesky, professor of political economy at Duke University and director of the Duke Center for International Development, serves as the co-chair of the study’s steering committee along with Susan Hyde, Kernan Robson Professor in Political Science at UC Berkeley.
Malesky presented preliminary findings from the five coordinated field experiments at the 2025 Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) Annual Meeting, hosted by UC Berkeley. He shared that the study’s initial evidence shows WACs can increase non-electoral participation and empowerment, but do not universally. He cited procedural knowledge and efficacy as the most likely mechanisms.