Soledad Artiz Prillaman

Women across the Global South, and particularly in India, turn out to vote on election days but are noticeably absent from politics year-round. Why? This book combines descriptive and causal analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from more than 9,000 women and men in India to expose how coercive power structures diminish political participation for women. In the book, I unpack how dominant men, imbued with authority from patriarchal institutions and norms, benefit from institutionalizing the household as a unitary political actor. Women vote because it serves the interests of men but stay out of politics more generally because it threatens male authority. Yet, when women come together collectively to demand access to political spaces, they become a formidable foe to the patriarchal political order. Ultimately, this book serves to deepen our understanding of what it means to create an inclusive democracy for all.

In India, there persists a striking gender gap in political participation. Women's political participation is important both on normative grounds of inclusion and because when women participate, politics changes. I develop a theoretical model of women's political behavior, arguing that women's lack of political participation is the result of the structure of women's political networks in patriarchal societies. I then evaluate the effect of expanding women's networks by leveraging a natural experiment that created as-if random variation in access to women-only credit groups. Participation in these groups had a significant and substantial impact on women's political participation—women's attendance at public meetings doubled. I provide suggestive evidence of three mechanisms underlying this effect: (1) larger networks, (2) increased capacity for collective action within networks, and (3) development of civic skills. These findings contribute to our understanding of how networks affect political behavior and underlie gendered inequalities in political participation.

State fiscal policy frequently focuses on stimulating a healthy business environment with the assumption that this is linked with long-term economic growth. The conventional wisdom is that a state’s tax rates are negatively correlated with economic development, prompting states to decrease business-targeted taxes to stimulate the economy. Surprisingly, however, very few studies have documented the long-term effects of these tax policies on different facets of the state economy and overall business atmosphere. In short, we do not know how the level of business taxation actually affects the economies of states. Using panel data for all 50 U.S. states from 1977 to 2005, this article examines the impact of state business taxes on the overall economic position of the state, specifically looking at their effect on economic development and business growth. With an elaborate set of controls, the article finds that state business tax cuts have little to no positive impact on gross state product, job creation, personal income, poverty rates, and business establishments.

When do elites work together to achieve their political goals? We argue that shared identity influences cooperation but can produce solidarity or rivalry. We argue these differential dynamics emerge in response to histories of mobilization and conditions of scarcity: under scarcity, solidarity is more likely within groups with shared histories of successful political mobilization, whereas rivalry is more likely within groups with no such history. We examine the effect of caste category congruence on the approval times of pork barrel projects in India. We observe faster approval of politician-proposed projects by officials from the same caste category in states with caste category-based mobilization around affirmative action. In states where affirmative action was imposed from the top down, project approvals are slower. We explore mechanisms and suggest the likely importance of institutionalized norms. These results demonstrate that, contingent on historical factors, identity congruence can both improve and worsen institutional performance.

Electoral quotas improve the representation of women and minorities, but critics argue that this comes at the cost of politician quality. While most work proxies for quality with qualifications, we argue that these must be conceptually separated, particularly in high-inequality contexts. Further, we argue that two of the conditions that generate quotas also influences their impact on quality and qualifications: selection discrimination improves politician quality while structural inequality worsens qualifications. This suggests that quotas can improve politician quality even when they worsen politician qualifications. We examine the effects of quotas using two censuses from India, covering 40 million residents and 13 states. Three facts show that quotas do not worsen quality. First, quota politicians are more positively selected than non-quota politicians. Second, this positive selection premium is increasing in selection discrimination. Third, the degree to which quota politicians have lower average education is decreasing in the supply of education.

The study of non-elite women’s political participation has recently received renewed focus, especially in the global south. A focus on non-elite women reveals distinct models and understandings of the gendered constraints to political participation and power. Yet, a lack of clarity in the conceptualization of non-elite women and their distinctions from elite women inhibits our understanding of the causes and consequences of women’s political inclusion and its subsequent implications for democratic accountability and resilience. This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding non-elite women, their distinct political preferences from elite women, and their available political strategies. We then review the literature on the constraints to non-elite women’s political participation, highlighting the roles of resources, political institutions, and patriarchal social norms. We conclude by considering how patriarchal norms and their global variants shape the varied political strategies of non-elite women and their implications for the sustenance of political gender gaps.

Evidence on the ability of representative bureaucracies to improve outcomes for women is mixed, with scholars suggesting that positive effects may be conditioned on environmental factors. We theorize the role of patriarchal norms in constraining the impact of female bureaucrats by limiting their available strategies, and inhibiting symbolic representation relevant to legitimizing socially contested domains. We test these arguments using an experiment that randomly varied support for female street-level bureaucrats to recruit youth into job-linked vocational training. Female bureaucrats did not improve outcomes for women, even when they received additional training and related support. Descriptive evidence suggests that patriarchal norms limited the perceived legitimacy of low-level female bureaucrats by community members to challenge conservative norms, and additional bureaucratic efforts only worsened outcomes. Our results suggest an important link between passive representation, perceived legitimacy/symbolic representation, and active representation.

Revolutionary democratic movements aim to reorganize political power. Using the case of Nepal's People War, which replaced a 240-year caste-based monarchy by a federal democracy, we evaluate how rebel wartime governments impact de jure democratic reforms and state capacity. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we show that wartime exposure to the Maoist "People's Government" increased political knowledge and engagement, especially among indigenous groups (Janajatis). People's government exposure also increased municipalities' fiscal capacity. To evaluate whether the observed association between People's government exposure and the election of Maoist Janajati mayors contributes to strengthening the democratic state, we combine a full census in 11 districts with electoral data and novel party selection committee survey data. Upper-caste party leaders exhibit implicit bias against Janajati political leadership. In People's Government areas, all parties have more Janajati party leaders and, consequently, more Janajati candidates. Likely reflecting the combination of rebel governance having emphasized class solidarity and electoral incentives, we show that mayors delivered more post-earthquake aid to the majority population group, irrespective of whether they were coethnics.

How do social networks enable and constrain women's political participation? While studies in developed democracies have demonstrated the importance of social connections in mobilizing participation through information dissemination and social pressure, studies in developing and clientelist democracies have emphasized how household gatekeepers and social norms limit the participation of women. We evaluate how material and social incentives shapes women's public participation and the conditions under which women's networks mobilize their participation through a spillover experiment embedded within previously-mapped networks. We first conduct a census of all adult residents in 14 villages in rural Bihar, collecting detailed network data, and then randomly invite surveyed citizens to a public meeting. Randomly varying the gender of the invitee, a material incentive to participate, and a recruitment incentive to mobilize others, we estimate the diffusion of invitations through men's and women's intra- and extra-household networks. Additionally, randomly varying at the village-level the availability of a women-only meeting, we evaluate the role of social costs in shaping women's participation. We find that women were highly responsive to material, recruitment, and social incentives. Our results also show that intra- and extra-household mobilization effects are larger for women. Our findings demonstrate the importance of social relations, particularly by defining the incentives to support women, to public participation.

Electoral quotas for women are the most common institutional solution to the problem of political gender inequality today, but widespread qualitative evidence from India – home to the largest such quota policy – suggests that men can co-opt these institutions. We measure actual and perceived political authority using data from elected officials and their families, bureaucrats, and citizens across two states and more than 6,000 respondents in rural India. Our data reveal that local Indian politics, across the board, is a family affair. Unlike typical conceptions of representative democracy, we document how local governance tasks are collectively shared between elected representatives and their family members in both male and female-led localities. However, female representatives have significantly less political authority than male representatives. We provide suggestive evidence that this authority gap derives from resource inequalities and patriarchal decision-making. We further show that women's political authority is associated with citizen political behavior. These findings have implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and representation.

Women in Pakistan lag behind men in electoral modes of political participation e.g., voter turnout and registration, as well as in non-electoral activities like informal community meetings, party rallies and meeting attendance, contact with representatives, and even engagement in political discussions with family and friends. At the same time, evidence shows that men and women hold distinctive preferences on public policy and issues of local service delivery. Thus, this status quo of large gender gaps in political participation has substantive implications for women’s welfare. How can we induce greater meaningful participation among women, i.e., participation that is reflective of their collective gendered preferences, and could thus be reasonably expected to impact distributional outcomes and improve women's welfare? We seek to answer this question through a field experiment studying the effectiveness of a training intervention delivered to women's groups (Women's Action Committees, or WACs) designed to increase women’s political participation through fostering a greater sense of group-based injustice, group identity, and collective efficacy.

Given the persistent gender gap in political participation and representation in India despite several decades of targeted policy interventions, I evaluate the use of political information via gender-oriented civics education at increasing women's political representation. Through a gender-oriented civics training implemented by the NGO Pradan, women will receive 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.

Despite widespread policies aimed at gender equality, women remain poorly represented in politics and policy. Global attention on women’s political inclusion has coalesced around solutions that enable women’s descriptive representation — the guarantee of women’s presence in political spaces. But presence does not guarantee voice. Women’s voices — their demands, needs, and interests — remain poorly represented in politics and policy. This imperfect representation of women’s voices in political institutions contributes to persistent and intractable inequalities in policy access and social outcomes. Nowhere is this more salient than in India, where women continue to face chronic underrepresentation in politics despite being home to the largest gender quota policy in the world. Presently, there are two institutions geared toward promoting gender equality that operate at a tremendous scale throughout India but are rarely conceptualized as working in tandem: electoral quotas and women’s groups known as Self-Help Groups SHGs are micro-credit collectives of women that meet regularly in women-only spaces and have been shown to substantially increase women’s political participation. Where electoral quotas are a top-down institution that ensures women’s presence in positions of political power, SHGs are a bottom-up institution that creates the conditions for women’s demands to be mobilized. In partnership with a leading NGO, we conduct a multi-state randomized experiment to evaluate the efficacy of three policy interventions -- agency-building trainings, peer networks of women elected representatives, and women-only citizen-representative public forums -- in enabling political agency and representation.

Women remain persistently underrepresented in elected office worldwide, with consequences for both fairness and the quality of governance. Existing explanations, largely derived from the U.S. and Europe, have coalesced around supply-side constraints: women are less likely than men to contest political office because of resource inequalities and socialized attributes. Demand-side constraints, namely party and voter bias, have often been viewed as less important. However, a growing body of research highlights that political parties may strategically field women candidates to appeal to specific constituencies or to maintain elite control over political resources. In this view, parties rather than voters may act as the primary gatekeepers to women’s political representation. Institutional protections, such as electoral quotas and reservations, aim to bypass these demand-driven constraints by tying the hands of parties and voters. Yet, as we show, motivated parties can undermine these mechanisms in practice. We evaluate these dynamics in Nepal, one of the world’s youngest democracies with a negative trend in women’s political representation across two democratic elections despite electoral quotas. Leveraging two complementary surveys -- a voter survey designed to measure attitudes toward female leadership and a survey of party selection-committee to elicit own preferences and their beliefs about voter attitudes – we evaluate how supply-side constraints on women’s willingness to run, demand-side bias among parties, and demand-side bias among voters contribute to women’s political under-representation.

Nepal’s shift from a 240-year-old monarchy to a federal democracy presents a unique opportunity to enhance political inclusion. While constitutional mandates protect three of seven local seats for women, women’s representation in the more powerful open seats is less than 5%. Quotas themselves have failed to ensure women’s political representation, with parties learning to subvert quotas and women’s representation declining over time. Can bottom-up mechanisms enable greater political inclusion? Supported by a leading NGO, we will randomize the mobilization of cross-party networks of women political aspirants to support their contestation in future elections. Networks will regularly convene to discuss common challenges and develop shared strategies for their political advancement. We expect these networks will enable women politicians’ political empowerment by (a) fostering collective action around increased representation for women, (b) developing shared strategies and skills for engaging male-dominated political institutions, and (c) signaling to voters and party officials the electoral viability of women candidates.

Modern disenfranchisement is often subtle and implemented through policies intended to bolster the functioning of democracy. The policy tools of voter suppression have received substantial academic debate, but less is known about policies aimed at suppressing political candidacy. The expansion of electoral affirmative action has often been met by resistance, with the most common refrain bemoaning the degradation of meritocracy. In some instances, countervailing policies have been implemented to constrain the selection of “high-quality” politicians. We study the consequences of education requirements for local political candidacy in two Indian states with more than 110 million people and nearly 200,000 local politicians. We leverage randomly assigned electoral quotas and show that politicians elected to seats reserved for women prior to these reforms perform as well as those elected to unreserved seats in delivering the world’s largest workfare program. We then compare the impact of gender reservations in border districts of states that did and did not implement educational requirements for political candidacy, and again find that quota-elected politicians perform as well as non-quota-elected politicians post-reform (if anything, this improves the performance of politicians in unreserved seats). We further show that candidate educational minimums disproportionately disenfranchise marginalized communities that, due to historic inequalities in the provision of education, are less likely to meet these minimum educational requirements. Our findings suggest that attempts to constrain meritocratic selection in fact deepen political exclusion with little evidence of improvements in politician performance.

The 40–60% of Latin American workers in the informal sector experience the state very differently from their formal counterparts. But they also experience the political process in a markedly different way. As a result of their historical and spatial marginalization, economic vulnerability, and institutional barriers, informal workers have been mobilized into very different political networks. Yet, in recent decades, the boundary between the formal and informal labor forces has blurred. Workers transitioning into/out of formality find themselves exposed (1) to new sources of information about politicians and the experiences of other citizens; (2) to political actors with different motivations and resources; and (3) to new kinds of political ideas, technologies and promises. This chapter descriptively documents the relationship between informality and political experience with a particular focus on how labor market status shapes access to political networks. It additionally highlights the important spatial variation in the concentration of informality and documents the descriptive correlation of this variation with the nature of political ties and linkages. As a result, this chapter provides one of the first approaches to understanding informality as both an individual and a collective identity.

When categorizing cross-national systems of social protection and welfare, Latin America is generally seen as having a system of its own, most notably differentiated from other systems of social protection due to highly segmented labor forces (Schneider, 2013). Prior to the late 1990’s, social policy in most Latin American countries was dominated by social protection programs targeted exclusively at workers employed within the formal economy. Since the late 1990’s, however, social policy in many Latin American nations has seen marked change with the extension of benefits to previously uncovered workers and citizens. Where traditional social insurance exclusively benefited the formally employed, these three policies areas represent expansion of benefits to formerly “outsiders”. This chapter seeks to understand this shift in the targeting of social benefits and insurance.

How do young men and women fare under India’s vocational (skills) training and job placement programs, and what constrains their subsequent job take-up and retention? Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) partnered with a large, government-funded skills training and job placement program to survey 2,610 former vocational trainees in 2016. We find a large male-favored gender gap in job placement: at 85%, young men are 13% points more likely than young women to receive a job offer. Young men are also 26% points more likely to accept jobs (with rates at 70% for males and 56% for females). We also identify high drop-out rates after vocational training: 74% of respondents who accepted a job after training had left it by the time of the survey (on average, 9 months after completing training), and only 20% of this group that had left their jobs were employed. Furthermore, there are stark gender differences in the reasons trained youth refuse jobs and subsequently drop out of the labor force. For young women, family concerns are the primary reason , while compensation and personal preferences are the primary reasons young men cite for refusing and leaving jobs after vocational training. However, for both young men and women, access to post-migration support is correlated with longer post-placement job tenure.