Strengths in Numbers: How Women's Networks Close India's Political Gender Gap
How might participation in women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs) increase women’s social connectedness and lead to their political empowerment?
Abstract
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 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:
larger networks,
increased capacity for collective action within networks, and
development of civic skills. These findings contribute to our understanding of how networks affect political behavior and underlie gendered inequalities in political participation.
The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India
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? In The Patriarchal Political Order, Soledad Artiz Prillaman 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. Prillaman unpacks 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. Eye-opening and inspiring, this book serves to deepen our understanding of what it means to create an inclusive democracy for all.
