Representation from below: how women mobilize inside parties
Keywords: party organization
South Asia
comparative politics
political economy of development
gender
representation

Political gender inequality is the most persistent form of gender inequality in the world, representing both normative and functional challenges. Women not only remain absent from parliaments, but they are also significantly absent at various levels of politics and party structures. This dissertation asks, “Can descriptive representation reduce gender inequality in political participation, and if so, how?” Conventional wisdom holds that women reduce political gender inequality by changing psychological predispositions; however, it ignores macro-sociological and institutional forces aligning female politicians’ incentives to actively mobilize women into politics.
This dissertation introduces “female-led party building,” a unified theory that improves our understanding of how descriptive representation reduces political gender inequality at the citizen level, inside party positions, and in the top echelons of politics. This novel theory incorporates insights from a diverse body of scholarship in gender and political economy, feminist economics, and political sociology as well as party building, party organization, and institutional analysis.
To summarize this theory, women carve a pathway to power by mobilizing at the grassroots level of the party hierarchy and by mounting bottom-up pressure on party elites for greater parity. Female politicians at the lowest levels of the electoral hierarchy enable this grassroots mobilization by lowering family and party organization barriers to recruit women as party activists, channeling women’s activism and collective action inside parties, shrinking the gender gap at the party activist level to build inclusive parties. Paradoxically, women’s social roles restrict their strategic options, and their greater reliance on local politics as a career launchpad incentivizes women to invest more in party building. Women optimize the fewer resources they do have by recruiting female activists; party leaders can observe this easily attributable party-building signal. The recruitment of women at the lower levels of party organizations, what I call “Representation from Below,” makes female politicians competitive in top-level politics, puts women’s issues on the party manifesto, and mobilizes women both to go to the polling booths and to march on the streets. Our understanding of representation, broker politics, distributive politics, and political participation is incomplete without recognizing this novel link between women politicians and grassroots party activists.
This study uses a multi-method and mixed-methods research design relying on survey experiments, the natural experiment of randomized gender quotas, and a close election regression discontinuity design, and rich qualitative data and in-depth fieldwork. It focuses on two of the world’s largest democracies, India and Brazil, which feature stark gender gaps in political participation across the spectrum of politics: in parliaments, on party membership, and civic participation. I collected data through ethnographically informed representative citizen and elite survey and gender-wise administrative turnout data at the most micro-site of India’s electioneering - the polling booth. In Brazil, I rely on a unique administrative dataset on party membership inclusive of all major parties for more than 5500 municipalities covering the period between 2000 and 2020. This research design enables me to provide one of the most rigorous investigations of the effects of female representation on women’s political participation across multiple political levels at scale. Rich qualitative data offers deep insights into the intricacies of how women recruit female activists, irreversibly transforming our understanding of female political leadership and party building.
This research design provides evidence supporting various elements of the theory. I demonstrate that women are more likely to recruit female party members and activists in India and Brazil, shrinking the gender gap inside political parties. In India, the data indicate that the uninterrupted presence of female politicians over a decade strengthens inclusive organization building. In Brazil, the data indicate that female incumbency both increases inclusive party building and reduces member attrition. In line with the theory, I show that women’s greater grassroots presence increases the likelihood that local female politicians climb up the political ladder in India and Brazil, shrinking the gender gap in political career progression. India has a stark gender gap in political survival, but my findings indicate that the presence of local female candidates increases the political survival of higher-ranking female politicians, bolstering their chances of retaining a major party nomination in subsequent elections. These results confirm that female politicians use grassroots mobilization to reduce the most persistent form of political gender inequality.
At the citizen level, I find female-led ground campaigns shrink the gender gap in partisan contact. Increasing contact with women is ushering in a new era of ground campaigns and female voter mobilization in India, resulting in greater female turnout at the polls and a lower gender gap in turnout. Data from the original citizen survey triangulated with the investigation of gender-wise turnout from 12K+ polling booths reinforces support for the mobilization-effects mechanism. This dissertation provides a rigorous investigation of the demonstration effects hypothesis. I use a within-subject survey experiment and show citizens photographs that signal the representative’s gender, which is randomly assigned by gender quotas. Women who view photographs of female politicians display lower levels of political efficacy, providing evidence contradicting demonstration effects. In contrast, randomized information about gender quotas, which reconciles the female political presence with pre-existing norms, neutralizes rather than deepens such backlash.
This dissertation advances “female-led party building” as a potent mechanism that shifts our understanding of female representation and shows how women’s grassroots mobilization inside parties upends entrenched power structures, enhancing democracy, increasing substantive representation, and delivering development. In doing so, this dissertation brings descriptive representation into the study of party building and party organization. Far from just changing perceptions, women have taken a step forward by fundamentally transforming parties.