Investigators: Soledad Prillaman, Deepak Singhania, and Alba Huidobro

Partner Organizations: Transform Rural India (TRI); Inclusion Economics India Centre (IEIC); Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar

Funders: Stanford VPDoR; Stanford Impact Labs

Location: Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, India

Status: Data collection

Abstract

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 an initiative to investigate proxyism as a reaction to India’s gender reservation system. 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. Our 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 exercise consists of survey data collection with elected representatives, citizens, and frontline workers in addition to two variations of behavioral audits.