in partnership with South Asia Center, Political Science Department, and Penn's Comparative Politics Workshop
About the Seminar:
Women’s representation in India’s national and state assemblies hovers at an abysmally low 9 percent. While there is a growing focus on women’s under-representation in low-income democracies, the unique opportunities and constraints that weakly institutionalized party systems pose to female political inclusion remain under-theorized. This seminar highlights how key features of India’s weak party system and patronage politics influence women’s political inclusion and will provide evidence to show how gender quotas in local politics reconfigure micro-level mechanisms that uniquely undergird weak party systems and increase female presence across political levels. Constraints that have circumscribed the span and pace of gender quota reforms to influence change will be discussed.
About the Speaker:
Tanushree Goyal is a final year Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. She is also an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. Starting in Fall 2022, she will join Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Affairs. Her research interests lie at the intersections of comparative politics, gender, and development with a regional focus in South Asia. Her dissertation uses natural, survey, and quasi-experiments to examine important questions in the field of representation and accountability, and is set in the context of the world's largest democracy: India.