Ancestral Irrigation and Women's Political Empowerment

This paper advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the adoption of irrigation agriculture during the preindustrial period is a predictor of contemporary cross‐country variation in women's political empowerment. Countries whose populations historically relied on irrigation agriculture as their primary subsistence mode tend to have lower levels of women's political empowerment today, confirming the enduring impact of certain historical practices related to agriculture on contemporary gender inequality. This result remains unaltered after controlling for an extensive set of geographic, historical, and contemporary factors that may be correlated with both irrigation agriculture and women's political empowerment and is confirmed by an instrumental variable approach that exploits cross‐country variation in irrigation suitability. The analysis also reveals that the contribution of ancestral irrigation to women's political empowerment has partly operated through its impact on the process of institutional development and the individualism–collectivism cultural divide. Furthermore, evidence from the second‐generation immigrants in Europe suggests that cultural transmission is an additional channel linking ancestral irrigation with contemporary attitudes about the appropriate role of women in society.