Domesticating Politics: How Right-Wing Parties Mobilize Women in India

• In Event: Party Organization, Campaigns, and Mobilization in India

Abstract

How do right-wing and religiously conservative parties mobilize women despite espousing traditional gender norms that assign women to the private sphere? I develop a theory of norm-compliant mobilization to explain this apparent paradox. Grounded in the context of patriarchal societies where women are traditionally associated with domestic roles, this theory proposes that framing political participation within the boundaries of these very gender norms can, perhaps counter-intuitively, create the conditions for women’s entry into politics. Drawing on the case of India, which witnessed an increase in women's mobilization for a right-wing Hindu nationalist party, I employ in-depth qualitative research and ethnographically-informed experiments to demonstrate how framing politics as seva, a descriptively gendered norm of selfless service, publicly reinforces women's domestic caregiving roles and downplays political engagement as potentially transgressive. This norm-compliant framing of political engagement circumvents perceived challenges to patriarchal notions of women's behavioral standards, facilitating their access to political spaces. These findings hold significant implications for understanding women's political inclusion, partisan mobilization, and the pivotal role of traditional norms in shaping political behavior and sustaining conservative movements worldwide.

Author

• Anirvan Chowdhury, Harvard University