Select Research

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.

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.

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. 

Women's access to contraception is typically linked to their greater participation in public life. Yet, while existing research has examined reversible forms of contraception, a more permanent procedure—female sterilization—is the most common in the world, and especially in South Asia. Unlike contraception, women's permanent inability to have children in strongly patriarchal settings could improve their intrahousehold bargaining power by freeing them of mobility constraints of fertility and pregnancy, or worsen their bargaining power as fertility may reduce their ``value" in contributing to the household. We test these dual hypotheses using individual-level panel data from India, and examine the association between sterilization and both political participation. We find that women who undergo sterilization are more likely to participate in political activities such as self-help groups, women's groups, and local political meetings than women who use temporary contraception. We show how sterilization, more than other forms of contraception, is associated with greater bargaining power and mobility.