Research

Academic Writing:

"Women in Electoral Politics: An Account of Exclusion." Forthcoming. In Pakistan's Political Parties: Against All Odds, edited by Niloufer Siddiqui, Mariam Mufti and Sahar Shafqat. Georgetown University Press.

"De Facto Suffrage: A Field Experiment to Improve Women's Turnout in Pakistan's General Election". Working Paper. (With Ali Cheema, Asad Liaqat & Shandana Khan Mohmand)

Pakistan has one of the largest gender gaps in turnout among electoral democracies around the world. A widely tested strategy to encourage turnout in a variety of contexts is door-to-door voter canvassing or mobilization. We conduct a field experiment in 2500 households in the city of Lahore to study the effectiveness of this strategy in increasing women’s turnout in the 2018 Pakistan General Election. We find that non-partisan mobilization only improves women’s turnout when mobilizers target men in households, and that targeting women alone is insufficient to effect changes in women’s political participation on Election Day. Using a costly behavioral measure of support for women’s role in democracy, we find that targeting men with the mobilization treatment increases their expressed support for women’s role in democracy beyond Election Day. Results from a post-election survey suggest that households where both men and women received the treatment saw greater political discussion among men and women, and that men provided women in these households with logistical support to vote on Election Day. These findings have theoretical implications for understanding women’s political participation in a context where they enjoy limited agency within the household, and practical implications for designing effective interventions to improve their participation under such conditions.

“Personal is Political: Prospects for Women's Substantive Representation in Pakistan” Working Paper.

I develop and test a theory of how gender inequality within the household is reproduced in the political sphere, and undermines prospects for women's substantive representation. Drawing on an original face-to-face survey conducted in 800 households in the Faisalabad district of Pakistan, I show that men and women within the same household prioritize systematically different public goods and services based on the context-specific division of household labor. Using a novel behavioral measure of preference expression, I demonstrate that women attach a lower value to their distinctive preferences than men, and are less willing to communicate these preferences to political representatives. The gendered asymmetry in preference assertion has implications for democratic theories of representation: it suggests that the link between political participation and substantive representation may be undermined by gender inequality within the household.

“What Women Want: Gender Gaps in Political Preferences" in Golder, Matt and Sona Golder (eds.) 2017. “Symposium: Women/Gender and Comparative Politics.”CP: Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Organized Section of the American Political Science Association 27(1): 42-49

"(When) Can Governments Change Norms around Violence Against Women" Working Paper. (With Macartan Humphreys & Summer Lindsey)

We study the conditions under which norm-based interventions can be effective in reducing levels of violence against women. Advocates of norms-based interventions have drawn on models in which space for norm change arises from a gap between private values and beliefs about the values of others. In such settings, interventions that re-calibrate people's beliefs about the values of others opens up the possibility of society-wide changes in behavior. Assessing whether these conditions are met is difficult, however. We introduce a new set of measures to assess the differences between privately held attitudes, and beliefs about the attitudes of others. Drawing on survey data collected from 7000 respondents in 250 slums in India, we find relatively high levels of tolerance for violence, but mixed support for the view that social beliefs are out of sync with privately held attitudes. From an impact evaluation of a randomized government intervention that builds on this model to produce change, we find little evidence of effects across a range of attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. We find some limited evidence for greater program effects in areas where individual beliefs about others’ values are out of sync with privately held values.

Research in Progress:

Exercising Her Right: Civic and Political Pathways to Women's Political Participation in Pakistan, Phase II (with Ali Cheema, Asad Liaqat and Shandana Mohmand)
Part of the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) Research Programme

Countering Gender-Based Violence in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (with Jocelyn Kelly and Maarten Voors)
In partnership with USAID

From Unequal to Inequitable: American Women’s Views on Gender Inequality (with Albert Fang & Annabelle Hutchinson)

Gendered Dynamics of Labor Market Search and Entry in Urban India (with Zachary Barnett-Howell)