Elevating Women's Voices in Governance and Policy-making in India

Global policy on women’s political inclusion has coalesced around solutions that enable women’s descriptive representation – the guarantee of women’s presence in political institutions. But presence does not guarantee voice. Nowhere is this more salient than India, where the world’s largest electoral gender quota lifts 1.45 million women to political office, yet women leaders often lack political authority. Original survey data from two states reveal that only 44% of female local representatives report having final decision-making power in their positions as compared to 90% of male representatives. Female citizens also reflect a dissatisfaction with the representation of their demands: 44% of surveyed women stated that their local leader did not care about their needs as compared to 27% of men.

Can existing political institutions be strengthened to better ensure the representation of women’s demands in policy-making and governance? We propose to evaluate three interventions in collaboration with Transform Rural India (TRI) to increase women elected representative’s political authority and increase the representation of women’s demands in local politics. Based on a recent pilot where these interventions were designed and implemented, our full-scale RCT will randomize (1) a set of capacity- and agency-building trainings to women elected representatives, (2) the formation of peer solidarity groups for women elected chairpersons, and (3) organizing women-only citizen-representative political forums. By cross-randomizing some interventions, we will evaluate both the collective and individual impact of each intervention on the authority of women elected representatives, the political participation of female citizens, and the substantive representation of women’s demands.