Gendered Networks and the Patriarchal Household

• In Event: Emerging Research on Gender and Political Participation in Developing Countries

Abstract

Much has been made of the gender gap in political participation in India. Underlying this inequality in participation, however, is a striking puzzle: across rural India, women show up to vote on election days at high rates, almost equal to those of men, but in between elections women remain markedly less present in political spaces, both relative to men and relative to their rates of voting. Why do women in rural India vote but not participate in politics between elections? I argue that the answer lies in the structure of women’s political networks and the nature of political organization more broadly. While we know that there are gendered differences in both the size and form of social capital more generally, we lack a simple understanding of the differences in whom men and women regularly engage with politically. Drawing on network data from a complete census of adults in six villages in rural India, I compare the structure of women’s and men’s social and political networks and then explore how ties inside and outside of the household shape women’s political behavior. Specifically, I compare the size of women’s and men’s political networks, the overlap between their social and political networks, the gender homophily of their political networks, their centrality to the whole network, and their average degree of connectivity to political elites. Women’s political networks are substantially smaller than men’s despite having similarly sized social networks. They also report being politically connected to men and women equally while men report political connections only with other men. I further evaluate the role of the household in women’s political networks and show that household members comprise a substantially greater share of women’s relative to men’s political networks. I then link the structure of men’s and women’s political networks to their political participation and show that the size of women’s political networks, specifically the size of their networks outside of their household, correlates with their non-electoral political participation. Drawing on data from 200 semi-structured interviews, I demonstrate that this is largely the result of women’s explicit coordination of their political behavior with their household, which leads to high levels of voter turnout but low levels of vote autonomy and non-electoral political participation. The findings from this paper demonstrate how nested political networks, in the household and the community, jointly constitute women’s political behavior in patriarchal societies.

Author

• Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University