Tanushree Goyal

Tanushree Goyal is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, gender and politics, and the political economy of development in the Global South.

Prior to joining Princeton, she was a post-doctoral scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2021 at the University of Oxford, where she was a member of Nuffield College.

Her research explores institutional strategies intended to reduce gender disparities in political opportunity and participation and offers insight on these disparities. In a related body of work, she looks at how social norms and economic or status disparities affect how women, especially those who are already marginalized, react to institutional reforms and gender inequities. The results of these studies have encouraged her to carry out research that advances our comprehension of how norms evolve and endure through generations, one of the most important and underexplored topics of study in the Global South.

She has geographic expertise in South Asia, and India in particular. She has joint ventures outside of South Asia in Ghana and Brazil. She supports her claims with extensive fieldwork, natural and survey experiments, and large-scale data.

With examples from India and Brazil, her book project is the first to examine gender and party activism and its effects on democracy and development in the Global South. She proposes a fresh viewpoint on the benefits of gender equality for democracy and development, demonstrating that women politicians bring about change because they are more likely than men to enlist women as grassroots party activists. This local partisan mobilization is what she refers to as "Representation from Below." Her work demonstrates how women's political activism and collective action within parties substantially influence party politics.

Twitter: @goyal_tanushree