Select Research

Quotas have increased women’s representation in politics, yet their capability is routinely questioned. This paper examines how these concerns shape the experiences of women politicians in their attempts to coordinate with the bureaucracy. Drawing on an original survey of elected officials in India, I find that women politicians report receiving significantly less assistance from bureaucrats with policy implementation compared to their male counterparts. Using data from a conjoint experiment from bureaucrats, I show that this gender gap is partially driven by bureaucrats’ negative perceptions of women’s effectiveness as policy implementers. Additionally, qualitative interviews and survey data reveal that women face unique mobility constraints and restrictive social norms, which jointly hinder  their ability to build critical networks that can help them overcome bureaucratic discretion. This paper provides one of the first theoretical and empirical accounts for the differential treatment women politicians encounter from bureaucrats, which can undermine their capacity to govern.

Manuscript available here, and a podcast version of the paper available here.

Scholars often use monetary incentives to boost participation rates in online surveys. This technique follows existing literature from western countries, which suggests egoistic incentives effectively boost survey participation. Positing that incentives’ effectiveness vary by country context, we tested this proposition through an experiment in Australia, India, and the USA. We compared three types of monetary lotteries to narrative and altruistic appeals. We find that egoistic rewards are most effective in the USA and to some extent, in Australia. In India, respondents are just as responsive to altruistic incentives as to egoistic incentives. Results from an adapted dictator game corroborate these patterns. Our results caution scholars against exporting survey participation incentives to areas where they have not been tested.

Despite women’s increasing representation in politics, their political agency, once in office, is challenged by household and institutional gatekeepers alike. Female politicians are often perceived as “proxies” for male elites, particularly in settings like South Asia where gender quotas have given rise to women’s candidacy at an exceptionally large scale. In conjunction with an NGO in Maharashtra, India, we form peer groups amongst elected women politicians to provide governance training and improve female solidarity. We further test the efficacy of this intervention to an alternate treatment that engages not only women politicians but men to understand the importance of forming cross-gender solidarity towards women’s political empowerment. We present suggestive evidence that participation in peer groups improves elected women's political agency. Women-only peer groups appear to improve elected women's self-confidence and independence through increasing gendered solidarity, support for gender-egalitarian norms, and professional networks. In contrast, mixed-gender solidarity groups have limited impact on official's confidence and independence, and may actually reduce gendered solidarity, support for gender-egalitarian norms, and attenuate women's professional networks. This intervention provides the first exploratory evidence of how peer groups alter women’s political agency amongst elected officials, showing the ability of peer groups to alter agency, with divergent effects dependent on their gendered composition. 

In patriarchal societies, intrahousehold dynamics constrain women's political participation. We use sterilization, a procedure that changes a woman's role from child-bearer to child-rearer, to understand how women's ability to participate outside of the household in political and civic spaces changes after the procedure. Using individual-level panel data on women's sterilization from India, we find that women who undergo this form of contraception are more likely to participate in political activities such as self-help groups, savings groups, and political parties, and more likely to discuss politics with their husbands than non-sterilized women. While we find similar effects for women who use reversible contraception, we find distinct pathways for sterilized women. Using within-person difference-in-difference analysis, we do not see sterilized women gain improved decisionmaking power or mobility. Instead, data suggests that sterilization may be linked to expanded opportunities in learning about political institutions, thereby fostering greater participation.