When Crises Entrench Gendered Power: Male Elite Adaptation in the Ugandan Parliament

Abstract

Recent scholarship argues that crises can create opportunities for women's political leadership. Yet crises also create opportunities for male political elites to adapt strategically to preserve their power. We develop and test a theory of crisis-induced adaptation, whereby male political elites respond by shifting political attention toward crisis dimensions that reinforce their authority. We examine this theory using the Ugandan Parliament's response to COVID-19, a health crisis in a policy domain traditionally associated with women. Using the complete corpus of parliamentary debates from 1998 to 2022 and text-as-data analyses, we find no evidence that COVID-19 reduced gender inequalities in legislative speech. Instead, the pandemic widened them. Men's dominance in legislative speech grew as they increasingly framed the pandemic through traditionally masculine policy domains—the economy and national security—rather than public health. Rather than opening space for women, crises can provide men with new opportunities to entrench political dominance.