Women’s representation in legislative and executive offices has increased in recent decades. We s... more Women’s representation in legislative and executive offices has increased in recent decades. We show, though, that while global legislative and executive trend lines have positive slopes, the two institutions experience distinctive temporal dynamics. When levels of women’s legislative representation rise, they tend not to slip back beyond their newly achieved level—women’s legislative representation tends to be characterized by a ratchet effect. This effect is relatively rare in cabinets, where increases in women’s representation are often followed by decreases. We call the latter phenomenon the see-saw effect: Countries experience one or more steps back for every step forward. These differences have normative and analytical implications. Normatively, we suggest that cabinet see-sawing is particularly problematic when domestic power balances are weighted toward executives. Analytically, we encourage researchers to use indicators of women’s empowerment that account for time and inter...
The majority of maternal health interventions in India focus on increasing institutional deliveri... more The majority of maternal health interventions in India focus on increasing institutional deliveries to reduce maternal mortality, typically by incentivising village health workers to register births and making conditional cash transfers to mothers for hospital births. Based on over 15 months of ethnographically informed fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 in rural Assam, the Indian state with the highest recorded rate of maternal deaths, we find that while there has been an expansion in institutional deliveries, the experience of childbirth in government facilities is characterised by obstetric violence. Poor and indigenous women who disproportionately use state facilities report both tangible and symbolic violence including iatrogenic procedures such as episiotomies, in some instances done without anaesthesia, improper pelvic examinations, beating and verbal abuse during labour, with sometimes the shouting directed at accompanying relatives. While the expansion of institution...
Drawing on vignettes from fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, the article explores how political pressur... more Drawing on vignettes from fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, the article explores how political pressures shape bureaucratic practices around the government’s flagship Janmabhoomi programme. It argues that competitive state politics manifests in clientelist–populist voter mobilization leading to two-level political pressures—state politicians pressure higher bureaucracy which in turn pressures the lower bureaucracy tasked with implementation, and local politicians allied with the governing party put direct pressures on lower bureaucracy for favouritism. Lower level bureaucrats cope with these impossible pressures by subverting official procedures, so that actual practices hardly match the rational Weberian construction in official documents. The article’s contribution lies in linking the ‘political game’ and the ‘bureaucratic game’ in a grounded empirical context.
The article surveys the comparative subnational literature on India and suggests some promising p... more The article surveys the comparative subnational literature on India and suggests some promising paths forward. One, careful selection of sub-state regions can improve the legitimacy of interstate comparisons and increase the validity of causal claims regarding state-specific governance and political economy. Two, there is greater scope for intra-state comparisons that control for state-specific factors and thereby identify more local, context-specific factors that drive political and other outcomes. Three, the roles and limitations of both causal and non-causal research designs need to be better understood in the subnational context. Four, for serious comparison it is imperative to explore only a few carefully selected primary units of analysis. While this highlights the importance of the traditional comparative case study approach, the implied qualitative /quantitative dichotomy is false: methods based on inferential statistics can and should be usefully nested in a causal comparative case study framework. Five, greater emphasis on process tracing can improve insights from subnational comparisons.
Will rising world powers tilt global norms in less progressive directions? While there has been m... more Will rising world powers tilt global norms in less progressive directions? While there has been much theoretical speculation on this question, few scholars have explored it empirically. This article uses existing empirical evidence to test the extent to which countries compromise their own values to gain favor with influential countries. We analyze the gender of ambassadors sent to rising powers and established powers and suggest that this analysis generates insight into the likely effects of rising powers on global norms. We find that the probability that a country will send a woman ambassador to a rising power is significantly lower than the probability that it will send a woman ambassador to an established world power. We show that this difference increases when the sending country exhibits high levels of international economic dependence. Our findings imply that the rise of countries like China, Russia, and India may undermine the global gender-balanced decision-making norm and ...
Conventional wisdom holds that although at the time of Kerala state formation in 1956 the norther... more Conventional wisdom holds that although at the time of Kerala state formation in 1956 the northern region (Malabar) lagged behind the southern region (Travancore-Cochin) in development indicators, interregional disparities reduced considerably in ensuing decades. The reduction in regional disparities is typically attributed to modern Kerala's welfare policy regime, which emphasized greater growth of infrastructure facilities in Malabar. This study presents evidence for health that suggests that while disparities in outcomes reduced over time, disparities in key infrastructural inputs did not reduce. These differing trends for infrastructure and outcomes are consistent with a diminishing returns argument that may have little to do directly with the Kerala regime. Rather, the potency of the Kerala regime lay in its ability to increase development inputs throughout the state (albeit without favoring the lagging region) and consolidate the conditions for 'public action' to effectively demand and utilize these inputs.
The study documents considerable spatial variation in change and stasis in development outcomes o... more The study documents considerable spatial variation in change and stasis in development outcomes over the decade 2001-11 (proxied by women's literacy and child sex ratio) even across villages within the same micro-region (taluk or sub-taluk) and with similar starting points. However, neither decentralization policy / practice nor other forms of public policy has identified village-level factors that mediate the impact of policy. Although extant literature has explored spatial variation, it has not explored such variation across different micro-regions of India, nor has it used methodologies that validate explanatory inference from spatial-longitudinal comparisons. The paper notes that the degree of spatial variation in change over such a short period of time is remarkably similar across different micro-regions of the country. It also proposes a tentative methodology for identifying village pairs to produce more rigorous comparative longitudinal analysis of the drivers of development change and stasis.
A large literature on the US and Western Europe establishes that there is a correlation between g... more A large literature on the US and Western Europe establishes that there is a correlation between gender and legislator activity. The article extends the literature to India by exploring a unique dataset of Question Hour activity in the lower house of parliament over a 30-year period (1980-2009). Compared with male legislators, female legislators ask 24% fewer parliamentary questions, and there are also significant differences in question content, even after controlling for important covariates. However, it is likely that female and male legislators
Why do some countries with low levels of women's legislative representation have high lev... more Why do some countries with low levels of women's legislative representation have high levels of women's cabinet representation? Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, we show that countries with high levels of women's legislative representation do not necessarily have high levels of women's cabinet representation. We discuss how legislative laggards can emerge as cabinet leaders through a case study of Ghana. We argue that three factors – a propitious institutional environment, an international context stressing gender-balanced decision making, and an autonomous domestic women's movement – promote women's incorporation into cabinets, even when pathways to legislative incorporation remain blocked.
This article explores legislator behaviour during the Question Hour in the lower house of India’s... more This article explores legislator behaviour during the Question Hour in the lower house of India’s parliament (the Lok Sabha) over a thirty-year period (1980-2009). It establishes that there is considerable variation in the volume of legislator activity, with some MPs remaining silent throughout their tenures (even as opposition MPs over full Lok Sabha terms) while others use the Question Hour much more effectively. Surprisingly, the activity of government backbenchers is only a little behind that of opposition MPs. The article constructs stylized facts regarding the relationship of three sets of covariates with the number of parliamentary questions asked by legislators: personal characteristics of MPs, legislative roles of MPs, and the states represented by MPs. The picture which emerges is that there is a disjuncture between symbolic and substantive representation. Despite increased symbolic representation, some groups – such as women and Scheduled Tribe MPs, but not Scheduled Caste MPs – still participate below par. At the same time, Question Hour is used more effectively by other groups – men and upper caste MPs, but also younger MPs and those with college education. Further, we uncover some puzzling state patterns: MPs from Orissa, Gujarat and Maharashtra seem to participate more than MPs from Punjab, Tamil Nadu and the northeastern states.
What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases i... more What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases in women's political representation? We argue that norm diffusion has larger positive effects on women's cabinet representation than on women's legislative representation. We also show that within cabinets, norm diffusion affects low-prestige appointments more than high-prestige appointments. We test these arguments using an original database of ministers from 1979 to 2009 and find that the association of women's representation with three separate indicators of international diffusion— levels of women's representation among neighboring states, levels of women's representation among intergovernmental organization partners, and time since ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women—is consistent with our arguments.
Based on a unique data set of Indian legislators and their behaviour during Question Hour over a ... more Based on a unique data set of Indian legislators and their behaviour during Question Hour over a 30-year period (1980– 2009), the paper establishes that there is a substantial gap in the volume of questions asked by legislators from national and subnational parties, even after accounting for party size and other covariates. Thus, despite increasing subnational party prominence in the electoral and executive arenas, national parties dominate activities to do with legislative oversight. The paper also explores mechanisms that may explain the difference in legislative activity between national and subnational party legislators.
Women’s representation in legislative and executive offices has increased in recent decades. We s... more Women’s representation in legislative and executive offices has increased in recent decades. We show, though, that while global legislative and executive trend lines have positive slopes, the two institutions experience distinctive temporal dynamics. When levels of women’s legislative representation rise, they tend not to slip back beyond their newly achieved level—women’s legislative representation tends to be characterized by a ratchet effect. This effect is relatively rare in cabinets, where increases in women’s representation are often followed by decreases. We call the latter phenomenon the see-saw effect: Countries experience one or more steps back for every step forward. These differences have normative and analytical implications. Normatively, we suggest that cabinet see-sawing is particularly problematic when domestic power balances are weighted toward executives. Analytically, we encourage researchers to use indicators of women’s empowerment that account for time and inter...
The majority of maternal health interventions in India focus on increasing institutional deliveri... more The majority of maternal health interventions in India focus on increasing institutional deliveries to reduce maternal mortality, typically by incentivising village health workers to register births and making conditional cash transfers to mothers for hospital births. Based on over 15 months of ethnographically informed fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 in rural Assam, the Indian state with the highest recorded rate of maternal deaths, we find that while there has been an expansion in institutional deliveries, the experience of childbirth in government facilities is characterised by obstetric violence. Poor and indigenous women who disproportionately use state facilities report both tangible and symbolic violence including iatrogenic procedures such as episiotomies, in some instances done without anaesthesia, improper pelvic examinations, beating and verbal abuse during labour, with sometimes the shouting directed at accompanying relatives. While the expansion of institution...
Drawing on vignettes from fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, the article explores how political pressur... more Drawing on vignettes from fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, the article explores how political pressures shape bureaucratic practices around the government’s flagship Janmabhoomi programme. It argues that competitive state politics manifests in clientelist–populist voter mobilization leading to two-level political pressures—state politicians pressure higher bureaucracy which in turn pressures the lower bureaucracy tasked with implementation, and local politicians allied with the governing party put direct pressures on lower bureaucracy for favouritism. Lower level bureaucrats cope with these impossible pressures by subverting official procedures, so that actual practices hardly match the rational Weberian construction in official documents. The article’s contribution lies in linking the ‘political game’ and the ‘bureaucratic game’ in a grounded empirical context.
The article surveys the comparative subnational literature on India and suggests some promising p... more The article surveys the comparative subnational literature on India and suggests some promising paths forward. One, careful selection of sub-state regions can improve the legitimacy of interstate comparisons and increase the validity of causal claims regarding state-specific governance and political economy. Two, there is greater scope for intra-state comparisons that control for state-specific factors and thereby identify more local, context-specific factors that drive political and other outcomes. Three, the roles and limitations of both causal and non-causal research designs need to be better understood in the subnational context. Four, for serious comparison it is imperative to explore only a few carefully selected primary units of analysis. While this highlights the importance of the traditional comparative case study approach, the implied qualitative /quantitative dichotomy is false: methods based on inferential statistics can and should be usefully nested in a causal comparative case study framework. Five, greater emphasis on process tracing can improve insights from subnational comparisons.
Will rising world powers tilt global norms in less progressive directions? While there has been m... more Will rising world powers tilt global norms in less progressive directions? While there has been much theoretical speculation on this question, few scholars have explored it empirically. This article uses existing empirical evidence to test the extent to which countries compromise their own values to gain favor with influential countries. We analyze the gender of ambassadors sent to rising powers and established powers and suggest that this analysis generates insight into the likely effects of rising powers on global norms. We find that the probability that a country will send a woman ambassador to a rising power is significantly lower than the probability that it will send a woman ambassador to an established world power. We show that this difference increases when the sending country exhibits high levels of international economic dependence. Our findings imply that the rise of countries like China, Russia, and India may undermine the global gender-balanced decision-making norm and ...
Conventional wisdom holds that although at the time of Kerala state formation in 1956 the norther... more Conventional wisdom holds that although at the time of Kerala state formation in 1956 the northern region (Malabar) lagged behind the southern region (Travancore-Cochin) in development indicators, interregional disparities reduced considerably in ensuing decades. The reduction in regional disparities is typically attributed to modern Kerala's welfare policy regime, which emphasized greater growth of infrastructure facilities in Malabar. This study presents evidence for health that suggests that while disparities in outcomes reduced over time, disparities in key infrastructural inputs did not reduce. These differing trends for infrastructure and outcomes are consistent with a diminishing returns argument that may have little to do directly with the Kerala regime. Rather, the potency of the Kerala regime lay in its ability to increase development inputs throughout the state (albeit without favoring the lagging region) and consolidate the conditions for 'public action' to effectively demand and utilize these inputs.
The study documents considerable spatial variation in change and stasis in development outcomes o... more The study documents considerable spatial variation in change and stasis in development outcomes over the decade 2001-11 (proxied by women's literacy and child sex ratio) even across villages within the same micro-region (taluk or sub-taluk) and with similar starting points. However, neither decentralization policy / practice nor other forms of public policy has identified village-level factors that mediate the impact of policy. Although extant literature has explored spatial variation, it has not explored such variation across different micro-regions of India, nor has it used methodologies that validate explanatory inference from spatial-longitudinal comparisons. The paper notes that the degree of spatial variation in change over such a short period of time is remarkably similar across different micro-regions of the country. It also proposes a tentative methodology for identifying village pairs to produce more rigorous comparative longitudinal analysis of the drivers of development change and stasis.
A large literature on the US and Western Europe establishes that there is a correlation between g... more A large literature on the US and Western Europe establishes that there is a correlation between gender and legislator activity. The article extends the literature to India by exploring a unique dataset of Question Hour activity in the lower house of parliament over a 30-year period (1980-2009). Compared with male legislators, female legislators ask 24% fewer parliamentary questions, and there are also significant differences in question content, even after controlling for important covariates. However, it is likely that female and male legislators
Why do some countries with low levels of women's legislative representation have high lev... more Why do some countries with low levels of women's legislative representation have high levels of women's cabinet representation? Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, we show that countries with high levels of women's legislative representation do not necessarily have high levels of women's cabinet representation. We discuss how legislative laggards can emerge as cabinet leaders through a case study of Ghana. We argue that three factors – a propitious institutional environment, an international context stressing gender-balanced decision making, and an autonomous domestic women's movement – promote women's incorporation into cabinets, even when pathways to legislative incorporation remain blocked.
This article explores legislator behaviour during the Question Hour in the lower house of India’s... more This article explores legislator behaviour during the Question Hour in the lower house of India’s parliament (the Lok Sabha) over a thirty-year period (1980-2009). It establishes that there is considerable variation in the volume of legislator activity, with some MPs remaining silent throughout their tenures (even as opposition MPs over full Lok Sabha terms) while others use the Question Hour much more effectively. Surprisingly, the activity of government backbenchers is only a little behind that of opposition MPs. The article constructs stylized facts regarding the relationship of three sets of covariates with the number of parliamentary questions asked by legislators: personal characteristics of MPs, legislative roles of MPs, and the states represented by MPs. The picture which emerges is that there is a disjuncture between symbolic and substantive representation. Despite increased symbolic representation, some groups – such as women and Scheduled Tribe MPs, but not Scheduled Caste MPs – still participate below par. At the same time, Question Hour is used more effectively by other groups – men and upper caste MPs, but also younger MPs and those with college education. Further, we uncover some puzzling state patterns: MPs from Orissa, Gujarat and Maharashtra seem to participate more than MPs from Punjab, Tamil Nadu and the northeastern states.
What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases i... more What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases in women's political representation? We argue that norm diffusion has larger positive effects on women's cabinet representation than on women's legislative representation. We also show that within cabinets, norm diffusion affects low-prestige appointments more than high-prestige appointments. We test these arguments using an original database of ministers from 1979 to 2009 and find that the association of women's representation with three separate indicators of international diffusion— levels of women's representation among neighboring states, levels of women's representation among intergovernmental organization partners, and time since ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women—is consistent with our arguments.
Based on a unique data set of Indian legislators and their behaviour during Question Hour over a ... more Based on a unique data set of Indian legislators and their behaviour during Question Hour over a 30-year period (1980– 2009), the paper establishes that there is a substantial gap in the volume of questions asked by legislators from national and subnational parties, even after accounting for party size and other covariates. Thus, despite increasing subnational party prominence in the electoral and executive arenas, national parties dominate activities to do with legislative oversight. The paper also explores mechanisms that may explain the difference in legislative activity between national and subnational party legislators.
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Papers by Suraj Jacob