Globalization and Women's Political Participation in Iran Case study: Cities of Tehran, Shiraz and Estahban

Women’s political participation is one of the important issues dealt with in different fields of social and political sciences. The promotion of the educational level of women, their interest in participating in different social and economic fields and, in sum, their attempts to gain different social roles illustrates the emergence of the social movement of women in Iran. Despite this movement, however, their participation is not great in the present situation while in most of the countries undergoing globalization women are widely active in political positions. In this paper we are going to adopt a new approach to the study of the relationship between globalization and women’s political participation and analyze the reasons of the low political participation of women in Iran. The research is quantitative and uses survey method. The sample under study consists of about 2260 women from Tehran, Shiraz and Estahban between sixteen to forty five years old, who were selected through systematic random sampling. The data were collected through self-report questionnaires. The results indicated that the variables secularity, the exposure of the city to ICT, social capital, modernism, years of married life, social trust and mass media, in sum, accounted for %41 of the variance in women’s political participation (R² = 0.411