Measuring women’s political empowerment through women’s political attitudes and ambitions: the WOPE index

Over the past decades, women’s political empowerment has catalysed increasing attention from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers as a desirable goal. Concurrently, many efforts have been made to propose an accurate measure of the concept. Yet most of the existing measures suffer from some concept-measurement inconsistency. In particular, extant indexes struggle to account for women’s political capabilities, namely, their actual willingness and capacity to participate in politics through both formal and informal chan nels of influence. To contribute to filling this gap, this paper proposes a new method to measure women’s political empowerment that combines expert-based and objective indicators of women’s assets and achievements with indicators measuring women’s self reported political engagement and perception of their own political role. By proposing the new WOPE index, we aim to give new input to the research on measuring women’s political empowerment to assist scholars, observers, and policymakers.