Books in Progress

Gendered Bureaucratic Resistance: How Women Politicians Navigate the Bureaucracy

My first 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, 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.

Public Financial Management, State Capacity, and Public Services in India

With A. Santhosh Mathew and Devesh Sharma (Manuscript under R&R)

Public finance management, or PFM, refers to the rules, systems, and processes that govern revenues, allocations of funds, expenditure, accounting, and auditing of public finances. Without financial resources to run programs, public service delivery will consistently fail, and many have argued it has in India. Somewhere in the pipeline of the government allocating resources and beneficiaries receiving services, public funds remain unspent, leak out of the system or fail to yield results. These leakages of funds out of the system result from non-transparent and inefficient systems of PFM, which many states have hardly reformed for decades.

Both political science scholars and economists have explained India’s weak state capacity through political economy and institutional failures. Bureaucratic decisions are politically influenced; administrators are laden with an overwhelming amount of work; corruption is rampant; and inadequate monitoring produce unaccountable public services. These partially explain why, despite decades of public spending, India’s publicly funded programs haven’t managed to lift approximately 22 per cent of its population out of poverty. However, they do not fully explain why otherwise well-intentioned government programs still suffer from execution failure.

We argue that while many of the failures identified by scholars contribute to poor public service delivery, they are also symptoms of the broken PFM architecture. Corruption, poor monitoring, and overburdened administrators do produce poor services, but the broken PFM system exacerbates these problems, among others. We identify six core deficiencies of India’s PFM system, financial float, corruption, poor auditing, low transparency, administrative burdens, and challenges for beneficiaries.

The book examines the six aforementioned deficiencies through primary interviews and case studies. We then build the case that in order to overcome these critical deficiencies stemming from its finance management framework, the government must modernize the PFM. We focus a section of the book for policymakers and stakeholders who seek such reforms by outlining a policy implementation plan with a sequential and phased approach to actualize modernization.

Overall, the book provides theoretical and empirical evidence on how public finance management impacts public service delivery and builds a holistic action plan for reforms.