PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS ON WOMEN'S POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT IN PAKISTAN.

This study aims at analyzing public perceptions on political empowerment of women in Pakistan. According to the World Economic Forum index on gender gap regarding political empowerment, Pakistan is one of the lowest among South Asian countries despite the highest quota for women in parliament. The paper is first of its kind with an attempt to empirically evaluate people's perceptions on women's political empowerment in Pakistan and also to look at determinants of these perceptions. For this purpose, a questionnaire is formulated and Likert scale is used to compute a score on attitudes regarding women's political empowerment by both males and females. The data was collected from Rawalpindi district in Punjab province of Pakistan and total sample size is 231. The empirical analysis consists of two regression equations. The first is regarding the determinants of choice of candidate either male or female with equal qualifications for which Logistic regression approach is utilized. The second equation is a linear regression model with people's opinions as dependent variable. Results show that age, gender, marital status, education and income of the household of respondent are significant determinants of attitudes regarding women's political empowerment. The study concludes that wide ranging measures at societal level are necessary along with the quota to ensure effective political empowerment of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]