Select Research
Journal Articles
Katharine Conn, Cecilia H. Mo, and Bhumi Purohit. 2024. “Differential efficacy of survey incentives across contexts: experimental evidence from Australia, India, and the United States" Political Science Research Methods.
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.
Working Papers
Formerly Titled “Laments of Getting Things Done: Bureaucratic Resistance Against Female Politicians in India”
Institutional mandates such as quotas have enabled individuals from under-represented groups to become politicians, yet their effectiveness is routinely questioned.This paper examines how these concerns shape the experiences of one such group,women politicians, vis-à-vis the bureaucracy. Contrary to existing theories which suggest gender biases alone lead to differential treatment of women, I show that bureaucrats’ strategic concerns about women politicians’ capabilities and networks are key to understanding why they are refused assistance from bureaucrats with routine policy-related requests at greater rates than men. Through a survey of bureaucrats, I show that bureaucrats perceive women politicians to have low competence and low mobilization capacity. Using survey data from women politicians in India, I further show that women have fewer upward networks to overcome such discretion. Taken together, this paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence of how career incentives of bureaucrats can shape their gendered treatment of women politicians.
Manuscript available here, and a podcast version of the paper available here.
“Do peer solidarity groups improve women politicians' political agency? Evidence from a pilot RCT in rural India," with Rachel Brulé, Alyssa Heinze, and Ishwari Kale
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.
“Sterilization and Women's Political Participation,” with Pradeep Chhibber, Megan Morris, and Anvita Kulshrestha (Working Paper, available upon request)
In patriarchal societies, intrahousehold dynamics constrain women's political participation. We use sterilization, a procedure that requires intrahousehold agreement and joint decision-making between a wife and her spouse, to understand how women's ability to participate outside of the household 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. We attribute this to an expansion in women's ability to contribute economically to the household, as evidenced by her increased likelihood to participate in wage employment after sterilization. Our finding suggests that increased female political participation can result from changes in women's perceived role in the household, and subsequently, her political participation.