Strength in Numbers: How Women’s Networks Close India’s Political Gender Gap

Graduate Student Associate Seminar

Soledad Prillaman, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government, Harvard University; Graduate Student Associate, SAI

Discussant: Zeynep Pamuk, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government, Harvard University

In India there persists a striking gender gap in political participation and representation, despite several decades of targeted policy interventions. Women’s political participation is important not only on normative grounds of inclusion, but because we know that when women do participate, politics changes. Prillaman presents a theoretical model of political behavior in rural India which argues that women’s lack of political participation is the result of coordinated political behavior in the household. Prillaman then argues and shows that women’s access to networks of other women is one channel through which we can see a shift towards a gender-inclusive equilibrium, even when resource allocations, social norms, and household dynamics would suggest otherwise.