Proxy Politics: Evaluating the Agency of Women Elected Representatives in India?

• In Event: Gender Quotas and Women's Agency

Abstract

Electoral quotas for women are the most common institutional solution to the problem of political gender inequality today, with quota policies in more than 130 countries worldwide. Extensive research examines their effectiveness in increasing women’s presence in legislatures (Krook 2009; Tripp and Kang 2008; Weeks 2022); representing women’s interests (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Franceschet and Piscopo 2008); reducing bias against women as political leaders (Beaman et al 2009; Alexander 2012); and influencing women's career aspirations and political engagement (Beaman et al. 2012; Bhavnani 2009). Yet, three decades after quotas first became a mainstream policy solution to political inequality, women remain under-represented in politics, even in the presence of institutional requirements (Paredes-Haz 2022), and qualitative evidence from several countries suggests that these policies can be strategically manipulated to maintain existing power structures.

India, with the largest of these policies, has been shown to reap many of the positive rewards of such policies, including the substantive representation of women’s interests, upward mobility for women politicians, and more general norm change. That said, widespread qualitative evidence suggests that these institutions are often co-opted by traditional male powerholders, who act as the de facto political leader in place of their female relatives (Turnbull 2022). Our own qualitative interviews with dozens of local elected women leaders support these claims and suggest that it is often the male family members of the elected women who serve as proxy in appointed offices. This practice poses a threat to the efficacy of quota policies and reveals the challenges to overturning historic and entrenched power structures.

How and when do men coopt legal institutions meant to ensure the descriptive representation of women? We define the cooptation of elected women’s political agency through their domination by male family members who act as the de facto representatives as political proxyism. To date, we have little knowledge of the scale, causes, and consequences of political proxyism. The limited research in this domain is unsurprising; identifying instances of proxyism, while easy qualitatively, is difficult to measure systematically. This paper fills this gap in our understanding by: (1) developing and validating systematic measures of political proxyism in two states of India, Gujarat and Madaya Pradesh, to estimate the scale of proxyism across diverse geographies; (2) evaluating the nature of political selection under proxyism; (3) estimating the conditional effect of political reservations for women by proxy status to better understand when descriptive representation yields substantive representation.

We leverage data from an original survey in 600 village governments across two states of India conducted with citizens, village bureaucrats, and political elites. Using these data, we measure political proxyism in two ways. First, we use a behavioral audit of citizens where we randomly approached six citizens, informed them that we needed to seek permission from the elected leader to conduct a survey, and asked whom we should speak with. Political proxyism, defined by this measure, is marked with a binary indicator of whether the de jure elected representative is named as the responsible political authority. Second, we use a series of questions with all surveyed stakeholders to capture reported power-sharing between elected representatives and their kins. Our data reveal that a substantial share of women elected representatives have limited political agency in office: 70% of women leaders defer most of their duties to male relatives. We then describe variation in the socioeconomic background, political experience, policy preferences, and priorities and attitudes towards political equality of the elected politicians and their relatives to compare characteristics across women elected representatives. Finally, we leverage original data on public service provision in each village and the randomization of women reserved seats in Indian villages to evaluate the effects women’s electoral representation conditional on proxyism.

Under political proxyism, women's voices and interests in politics and policy may be inadequately represented. Quotas aimed at enhancing women's electoral representation are likely to be constrained by unaddressed patriarchal structures. This has broader implications for democracies and the pathways to political inclusion. When institutions meant to address political inequalities are co-opted by those with historical power, they risk perpetuating the hierarchies they aim to challenge. Increasing knowledge of how and when these institutions fail to accomplish their stated aims can help to create fairer and more egalitarian political processes.

Authors

• Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University

• Alba Huidobro, Stanford University

• Deepak Singhania