Doctoral Dissertation Research: Disconnected and Uninformed: Dissecting and Dismantling India's Political Gender Gap

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary Despite the growing focus on female empowerment in the developing world, many women remain largely excluded from the political process and a substantial gender gap in political participation persists today. Across the globe, women accounted for only 17% of members of parliament in 2009, up from 10% in 1995. Evidence suggests that when women are actively engaged in politics, public goods are allocated differently and development outcomes improve. This project seeks to understand better why women in developing countries are disengaged from politics and to identify the mechanisms through which the prevailing political gender gap is reduced. Contrary to seminal work in the U.S., the PI argues that low levels of women's political participation are not due to women's lack of economic resources. Instead this project evaluates two alternative explanations for women's lack of political participation: limited access to social networks outside of the household and a lack of exposure to the political system. To empirically fill this gap in our knowledge and test these hypotheses, the PI collects and uses both survey and experimental data from India, in coordination with the NGO Pradan, to identify the determinants of political engagement for rural women and evaluate whether access to social networks and political information increase women's political participation. Technical Summary This project evaluates two mechanisms aimed at increasing women's political participation. In doing so, the proposed research will address two principal questions: 1) Can providing political information and exposure through gender and politics trainings increase women's political participation? and 2) Can this political training activate social networks to further increase women's political participation and combat prevailing social norms limiting women's role in politics? These questions will be answered through a series of experiments: a natural experiment using a geographic regression discontinuity (GRD) design to identify the impact of social networks and a randomized control trial (RCT) to identify the effect of political exposure and its interactive effect with social networks. Random assignment of networks will be approximated using a GRD design, which leverages an arbitrary boundary to identify villages in which Pradan has operated and mobilized women into small groups. This allows for an estimation of the average impact of networks on women's political participation. For the RCT, a randomized gender and politics training intervention with the NGO Pradan, will provide women with information about the political system and their rights and entitlements within this system and will be directly exposed to existing political institutions, with the aim of reducing informational barriers to political participation. By providing this training on both sides of the GRD boundary, the RCT further tests the necessity of social networks for women's political participation and the ability for the gender and politics training to activate existing social networks and further generate political engagement.