Harvard-Brown Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics (In Person)
Date and Time
Location
"The Limits of Electoral Gender Quotas in Rural Local Bodies"
Speaker:
Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California.
Contact:
Selmon Rafey
srafey@fas.harvard.edu
Cosponsored by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University, the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
Chairs:
Ashutosh Varshney, Associate. Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, Department of Political Science; Director, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University.
Feyaad Allie, Faculty Associate. Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Attendance Information:
Please register to attend this event.
Description:
The seminar will discuss the long-term consequences of gender quotas on women’s political representation in India. Using a novel dataset of over 20,000 rural local governance bodies spanning 20 years, the findings highlight the tension between achieving numeric and substantive representation. While quotas improve the numeric representation of women, they do not necessarily guarantee substantive representation. Removing quotas could erode the progress made in descriptive representation, potentially undermining broader efforts to improve women’s political representation.