Select Research

Do survey incentives that improve response rates in the United States and the Global North perform just as well in other countries? Studies on web survey recruitment have largely come to a conclusion that monetary incentives recruit a higher share of respondents than non-monetary responses. Though these findings largely come from the U.S. or Europe, scholars in other regions have relied on similar monetary incentives such as gifts or lotteries to recruit respondents. We test the assumption that monetary incentives are effective across cultures by running an incentives experiment in Australia, India, and the United States amongst a similar population of pro-social individuals in each country. We find that monetary incentives are effective in the U.S. and Australia, but Indians respond more frequently to charity appeals or descriptive appeals. An additional dictator game corroborates this finding, showing that Indians are much more likely to donate potential lottery winnings to charity than individuals from other countries. Our results suggests that incentives that have worked in Western settings cannot be transported to other settings without prior testing and a careful consideration of the cultural or socioeconomic context of a country.

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. 

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.