Join us for a Brown-Harvard Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics with Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California.
The seminar will discuss the long-term consequences of gender quotas on women’s political representation in India. Using a novel dataset of over 20,000 rural local governance bodies spanning 20 years, the findings highlight the tension between achieving numeric and substantive representation. While quotas improve the numeric representation of women, they do not necessarily guarantee substantive representation. Removing quotas could erode the progress made in descriptive representation, potentially undermining broader efforts to improve women’s political representation.
