The Voices Project
How can we facilitate India’s transition from gender parity in governance to gender equality in governance?
What is proxyism, and what does it mean for the quality of women’s political inclusion?
What is the optimal set of solutions to support women’s substantive political representation in India?
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.
In order to facilitate India’s transition from gender parity in governance to gender equality in governance, i.e., from women’s descriptive representation to substantive representation, the ID2 Lab has launched a research initiative consisting of two parallel projects. The first focuses on understanding proxyism as a reaction to India’s gender reservation system. The second focuses on identifying the most effective solutions to counter the impact of proxyism and to reinforce women’s substantive political representation in local Indian politics.
Part I. Understanding Proxyism
The first component of the Voices project is motivated by the on-the-ground reality of proxyism in Indian village governance which suggests that political reservations for women are not a direct path to political equality. A recent viral video from the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh depicts seven men being sworn into political office in the seats officially won by their female family members (representing 70% of the seats reserved for women in their community). Such a practice is so common that it has been coined into a term, “sarpanch pati” (i.e. husband chairperson), referring to the elected female quota leaders who serve as figureheads for their husbands, also called proxyism. Just last month, the state of Punjab has gone as far as to ban this practice, stating that male kin of women elected representatives will no longer be allowed in local government meetings. The implication of these anecdotal reports is that while women may hold de jure power they may not hold de facto power.
The research on proxyism in Indian governance to date is unsurprisingly limited; identifying instances of proxyism, while easy qualitatively, is difficult to measure systematically. Not only do we lack a valid measure of proxyism, but we also lack an understanding of its scale, its determinants, and its consequences. The lack of valid measurement of this political problem inhibits the successful identification of solutions. In light of these challenges, the ID2 Lab’s proposed project seeks to develop and validate systematic measures of proxyism and women elected representative agency in order to understand who become proxy and non-proxy quota politicians. The first major data collection exercise for this project is expected to be completed in the spring of 2024. This data collection exercise consists of survey data collection with elected representatives, citizens, and frontline workers in addition to behavioral audits across two Indian states.
Part II. Elevating Women’s Voices in Policymaking
The second component of the ID2 Lab’s research initiative geared toward elevating women’s voices in policymaking involves the evaluation of a series of interventions launched by the Transforming Rural India Foundation (TRIF). This project is motivated by the need to create linkages between existing bottom-up institutions and top-down institutions as a means of creating greater and more sustainable change. 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 TRIF, the ID2 Lab will evaluate the efficacy of three existing interventions that link these top-down and bottom-up institutions as a means of catalyzing systemic change. These three interventions are: providing capacity-building and support to women elected representatives, organizing women-only citizen-representative political forums, and developing the networks of women elected representatives and bureaucrats. The research team will evaluate both the collective and individual impact of each intervention on gender equality outcomes through conducting a randomized control trial with five treatment arms. The intervention pilots are expected to begin in the spring of 2024.