An Empirical Analysis Of Women’s Political Participation On Carbon Dioxide Emissions

With the rapid growth of social economy,the needs of various fields such as renewed social productive activities and daily life have led to a continuous increase in the demand for fossil energy.In the process,carbon dioxide emissions are gradually increasing,leading to global warming and destroying the balance of the ecosystem.This is a danger signal to human society,which is already contradicting with the higher-level requirements of human beings for the quality of life.As a result,global warming has increasingly become an important concern of all countries,and how to achieve carbon emission reduction goals has become the focus of research in global ecological environment governance.Global sustainable development depends on the construction of ecological civilization.However,economic and social development often inevitably causes damage to the ecosystem,which in turn threatens the safety and even survival of all human beings.In order to maintain the ultimate safety of human beings,environmental governance must be promoted.Feminism’s exploration of environmental protection provides useful enlightenment for striving to realize the sustainable development of human society.Scholars at home and abroad have discussed the relationship between women and the environment and acknowledged that women play an important role in environmental governance.China also encourages and supports women’s extensive participation in government decision-making and management,and pays attention to exploring women’s potential in environmental governance.Studies by foreign scholars have shown that regions with high levels of women’s political participation are accompanied by changes in policy formulation such as improving environmental legislation and strictly implementing environmental protection policies,thereby helping to curb carbon emissions and improve environmental quality.Many literatures also show that there is a significant positive impact on women’s political participation and environmental quality.However,due to factors such as history,culture and economic development,Chinese women’s political participation is still at a low level,and women’s voice in decision-making and management is weak.Whether their environmental awareness can be fully reflected at the political level remains to be studied.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the environmental impact of Chinese women’s political participation.Exploiting the potential of women so that they can actively devote themselves to environmental protection and jointly participate in global environmental governance is of great significance for eliminating global gender discrimination and promoting gender equality.To this end,this paper constructs a static panel model based on the panel data of 30provinces(municipalities and autonomous regions)in China from 1998 to 2018,and selects the proportion of women representatives in the delegations of provinces,municipalities and autonomous regions of the National People’s Congress to measure the level of women’s political participation in each region.This paper quantitatively examines the impact of Chinese women’s political participation on carbon dioxide emissions;adds the interaction term between women’s political participation and corruption in the model setting to explore the moderating effect of corruption on women’s political participation and carbon emissions.Besides,the quadratic term of the economic development level is incorporated into the econometric model to test the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve(EKC)assumption in this paper.In addition,based on the existing theoretical achievements and practical research,this paper considers regional heterogeneity,and examines the differences in the impact of female political participation on carbon emissions in the eastern,western and central regions.The empirical research results show that: at the overall level,women’s political participation has a significant negative impact on carbon emissions,and the deepening of regional corruption will weaken the inhibitory effect of women on carbon emissions.At the regional level,in the eastern and western regions,women’s political participation has a certain positive impact on reducing carbon emissions,and this impact will be weakened by the level of regional corruption;however,in the central region,the degree of women’s political participation and carbon emission levels are not statistically significant,and the mechanism needs to be further explored.In addition,as far as the eastern and central regions are concerned,the EKC hypothesis still holds.However,this inverted "U" relationship between economic growth and carbon emissions was not found for the western region.The signs of the coefficients of other control variables are basically consistent with the existing research.Finally,according to the research conclusions,this paper considers China’s real situational factors,and puts forward practical reference opinions on how to use women’s environmental protection power to improve environmental quality.