Books

My solo-authored book project combines extensive fieldwork and mixed-methods research to understand how female politicians navigate post-colonial and male-led bureaucracies in the Global South, which continue to exert inordinate control over resource allocation for policy implementation. Yet, we know little about how governance outcomes are shaped by interactions between politicians and bureaucrats in democracies, especially given bureaucratic cultures tend to be dominantly governed by men. In such settings, female politicians can traditionally take advantage of principal-agent relationships to produce policy outcomes but not all relationships fall into this framework. In hierarchical administrative settings, for instance, village politicians need sub-district and district-level bureaucrats to implement policies, but these politicians don’t have direct authority over the bureaucrats they rely on. When politicians cannot reward or sanction bureaucrats, what governs bureaucratic behavior and importantly, under what conditions does it bias against women in politics?

I fill this gap by theorizing that where bureaucrats have more power than politicians, bureaucrats’ gender biases and career incentives lead them to help politicians who bureaucrats perceive to have the most instrumental skills to build political capital with higher-level officials—men from ethnic majority groups. Within the administrative hierarchy, low-level bureaucrats seek to build a positive reputation amongst high-level political and bureaucratic principals to secure desirable job transfers. Bureaucrats' explicit and implicit biases about women's low competence and poor networks with high-level politicians lead them to discriminate against female politicians, particularly from marginalized ethnic groups. I show that this dynamic leads to women experiencing three times higher bureaucratic resistance—where bureaucrats refuse to help them with requests—than men, leading to lesser and slower fund allocation for public services. When women are shut out by bureaucrats, it negatively impacts their actual ability to deliver public goods, further perpetuating negative perceptions about their leadership abilities in a self-reinforcing cycle that is detrimental to both politicians and their constituents.

I provide support for this theory with interviews conducted during five months of fieldwork in the Indian states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat in 2019, along with additional data collected from a distance during the months of the pandemic that followed. I then provide both descriptive and causal evidence of explicit and implicit bureaucratic bias against female politicians using a conjoint experiment, an implicit association test, and descriptive data from a survey of mid-level, sub-district bureaucrats in the state of Telangana (n=253). To validate that women experience disproportionate bureaucratic resistance, I conduct a phone survey of village-level politicians (n=1,016) in Telangana to learn about when and why politicians are refused help on service delivery projects. After testing the bias mechanism through politicians' survey, I turn to a natural experiment that estimates the size of the real-world resource penalties that marginalized politicians incur because of bias. I exploit random variation in the rotation of gender quotas in local elected offices, and show that constituencies led by women receive less in resource allocations than constituencies led by men.

While the growing literature on gender and politics elucidates how voters and political parties act as gatekeepers to women's political advancements, my book project provides the first theoretical and empirical account of how bureaucrats can undermine the success of female politicians. It further demonstrates the detrimental consequences of the bureaucracy not only on women’s career trajectories, but also on the constituencies they govern. In doing so, this book project also provides potential pathways to reduce bureaucratic resistance.

Even when public programs are well-funded and well-designed, why do they fail to deliver? While existing research in political economy has identified various challenges affecting public service delivery, Public Financial Management, State Capacity, and Public Services in India unveils a critical, yet often overlooked factor: the architecture of public finance, particularly expenditure management systems. Drawing from existing literature, field experience, and primary data from government officials and citizens, we analyze how India's public finance management system contributes to pervasive governance challenges. The book proposes a series of policy changes, termed 'on-demand architecture', that aim to provide both funds and real-time data about those funds to effectively improve India's public finance management and responsiveness of service providers to citizens, civic society, and other stakeholders. By reimagining public finance beyond its traditional accounting and auditing function, the book presents a new framework for expanding India's expenditure capacity and enhancing public service delivery.