UC Berkeley

Women constitute half of India’s electorate; yet politics in the country has traditionally been a forum for men to participate and articulate their interests. Studies indicate that women have distinct preferences, and that politics and policy choices change when women enter the political arena. In this context, the 2014 national election marked a watershed for Indian politics. There was an unprecedented increase in women’s participation in visibly partisan ways: 27% more women attended party meetings, rallies, and canvassing activities. But paradoxically, this growth was most pronounced among women voting for the BJP, whoseideology of political Hinduism, or Hindutva, prescribes traditional gender roles for women. What explains the BJP’s success at engaging women despite its ideology of masculine Hindu nationalism? And what are the effects of this engagement on women’s agency and democratic practice?

Women’s political activism in these visible ways, what I call active participation, is especially surprising because of the deeply patriarchal contexts in which it is taking place. When women engage with political parties in these public settings, it transgresses social and cultural norms that tie women to the home, and consider party politics as inappropriate for them. Breaching these norms can be costly, both for women and their families. Consequently, men act as gatekeepers to women’s participation. The key, then, for a political party that seeks to mobilize women, is to lower these costs.

I develop a theory of norm-compliant mobilization to explain how religiously conservative parties can incorporate women without disturbing the status quo within the family, party, or society. In patriarchal contexts, framing politics as congruent with traditional gendered norms reduces the costs of women’s participation by connecting the political sphere to theprivate. This domestication of politics helps women obtain social and familial approval for their public engagement as it is no longer perceived as challenging men’s authority within the family, or patriarchal structures of power in the party, or even society at large. In the case of India, the BJP’s solution to this predicament has been to frame politics as seva, a powerful norm of selfless service that overlaps women’s domestic care-giving roles. I test these arguments through a multi-method approach that emphasizes triangulating multiple data sources and strategies. I leverage extensive qualitative research—ethnography, participant observation, shadowing, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews—conducted over a span of three years to show how the BJP’s activists describe their active participation and agentic experiences in the language of seva. Next, I draw on computational text analysis of social media data, together with multiple innovative surveys and experiments administered to women party activists, female citizens, and male gatekeepers to show the causal effect of seva in enabling women’s active participation. Finally, I discuss the validity of my argument across a range of contexts, including Asia, Western Europe, and the US to show that the patriarchal separation of spheres for men and women, and norm-compliant mobilization frames have been powerful enablers for women’s political participation for conservative parties across Christian and Islamic traditions.

My research provides a bridge between several traditions in the study of political participation. First, it shows how political participation is an outcome of the interaction between the political and private spheres, where political parties can shape the public perception of women’s active participation. Second, it bridges institutional and behavioral approaches byhighlighting the vital role of social norms in determining the political inclusion of marginalized groups. In particular, it shows how norms can normalize activities that may otherwise be deemed as subversive, and as such, are vital for the sustenance of conservativism in India and across the world.

Finally, I highlight an important but understudied tension between political engagement and democratic deepening. Much empirical research implicitly assumes higher—and more equal—participation to be positively associated with democratic health. Yet the Indian case of democratic backsliding amidst rising participation belies this. The answer to this apparent paradox, as my dissertation shows, can partially be found in the increased deployment of traditional norms like seva as a strategy of political engagement and recruitment. While seva does nurture agency, it is ultimately not antagonistic to existing structures of power. It therefore preempts the productive models of citizen autonomy—seeking accountabilityand claim-making—that scholars have come to highlight as a feature of robust democracies. Thus, I show that the intensive margin of how people engage—a function of how they are mobilized—is at least as important as the extensive margin of how many people participate. Hence, the mechanisms that enable inclusion can help us understand political transformations in other countries, especially as conservative, right-wing and populist movements gain traction across the globe.