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.

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.

When do bureaucrats help politicians achieve their goals? We argue that shared identity can produce solidarity or rivalry. Under conditions of scarcity, solidarity is more likely between groups with shared histories of successful political mobilization, whereas rivalry is more likely between groups with histories of unsuccessful mobilization. We test these claims by examining the effect of caste on the approval times of pork barrel projects in India. Consistent with our theory, politicians see projects approved more quickly by bureaucrats from the same caste category in Southern India, where lower castes successfully mobilized for affirmative action in the past. In Northern India, where such mobilization efforts were less successful, project approvals are slower. These results suggest that shared identity can supplement formal institutional controls in bureaucracies and that identity congruence can have positive or negative effects dependent on contingent historical factors.

Can bureaucracies promote inclusive growth while solving market frictions? We theorize and evaluate the role of the state in supporting Indian women's labor force participation - an issue of great concern given low and declining rates of women's employment - through a program where bureaucrats recruited youth into job-linked vocational training. Leveraging arbitrary variation in program eligibility, we show that state-led recruitment doubled women's enrollment and job take-up with no effect for men. Gender-specific impacts could reflect differential returns to information (the "information effect"), knowledge of preferences (the "embeddedness effect"), or the importance of government signals (the "legitimization effect"). To adjudicate these mechanisms, we conducted a randomized experiment varying the participation of the lowest-level, largely female bureaucrats. We find that these highly embedded bureaucrats do not drive our results, and the information effect appears to dominate. These findings highlight how the government can play a crucial role in supporting inclusive growth.

Critics of electoral quotas -- a popular remedy for historical inequalities, used in most countries around the world -- are concerned that these institutional protections for marginalized groups worsen politician quality. We theorize that they can do the reverse: under conditions of discrimination, voters will hold minority politicians to higher standards. However, conditions of historic inequity may constrain the supply of highly educated politicians from marginalized backgrounds. These dual conditions - historic inequity and present-day discrimination - serve as a double bind on political representation for marginalized communities. We confirm that voters place a higher premium on education for minority politicians using two large-scale censuses covering more than 30 million residents and 13 states of India. We additionally document how this dynamic is undercut by the limited supply of educated minority candidates in many villages. When there is a sufficiently high supply of educated minorities, electoral quotas improve politician quality.

Decentralization bears the promise of more representative and accountable democratic institutions. In many countries, particularly new and developing democracies, this vision of decentralization has yet to be realized, instead yielding more extractive and corrupt institutions. Can new democracies generate institutions that are both representative and effective? As one of the world's most ambitious decentralization processes, Nepal’s recent political transformation provides a useful laboratory to evaluate the consequences of decentralization in a new and developing democracy. In 2015, in the wake of the decade-long Maoist People’s War, Nepal abolished its 240-year-old monarchy and established a new constitution formalizing Nepal’s political structure as a federal republic. The 2017 local elections in Nepal innaugurated this decentralization process, ushering into elected office more than 30,000 newly elected representatives. Using a census of 3.68 million Nepalis across eleven districts, party nomination lists, and data on the universe of candidates and elected politicians, we provide a comprehensive documentation of patterns of political selection in Nepal’s first local elections. We show that politicians are positively selected relative to both the population and their respective clans, being significantly more educated and richer than the population they represent. Politicians are also generally representative of the population in terms of Caste and gender. This representativeness, however, is largely the result of political reservations. Furthermore, elitism does not substantially drive political selection: belonging to historically elite castes is only weakly correlated with being a candidate in these elections and this relationship is absent among candidates from the Maoist party, consistent with Maoist ideology. We then compare these recent patterns of selection with electoral outcomes from local elections conducted under monarchic rule in 1992. These historic elections resulted in relatively less representative institutions, where almost no women and few Dalits gained representation. Remarkably, modern Nepal bears a closer resemblance to consolidated Western democracies, achieving both meritocratic and generally inclusive political institutions. We argue and suggestively demonstrate that this is in part the result of Maoist influence on the Constitutional process.

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.

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, largely through minimum education requirements. We study the consequences of education requirements for local political candidacy in two states of India with more than 110 million people and nearly 200,000 local politicians. We leverage randomly assigned electoral quotas and show that politicians elected in seats reserved for women prior to these reforms perform as well as those in unreserved seats in the delivery of 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 non-quota elected politicians post-reform (if anything this improves the performance of politicians in unreserved seats). Descriptive evidence of political selection suggests that this may be because, absent reforms, highly educated quota politicians perform substantially better than highly educated non-quota politicians, in line with theories of voter discrimination. 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.

Gendered imbalances in political spaces remain widespread and calls for "women's empowerment" are now commonplace. Despite the need for and benefits from women’s political empowerment, few frameworks exist to conceptualize and assess the extent of prevailing political power imbalances, particularly at the individual level. Further, unlike economic empowerment, political empowerment — the ability to choose when and how one interacts with political institutions — has received less scholarly attention. Measurement of gendered political behavior has generally focused on actual political participation. These measures, and many of the models they test, fail to capture the core aspect of political empowerment - the presence of agency. Our paper proposes a theoretical framework to conceptualize political empowerment at an individual level, highlighting the importance of conceptualizing agency. We use this framework to develop a set of survey questions to construct a measure of women’s political empowerment at the individual-level. We test the reliability and validity of this measure using data from an original survey with roughly 1,000 women in rural India. We then highlight the importance of conceptualizing and measuring political empowerment by demonstrating the empirical distinctness of empowerment from participation, evaluating variation in the predictors of empowerment and participation, augmenting the learnings from a series of replications focused on shifting participation, and providing new empirical evidence of the link between empowerment and within household political preferences.

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.

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.

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.