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In India, as in many democracies, there has long been a discernible gender gap in citizens’ political participation. For decades, Indian men were significantly more likely to vote on election day compared to women. It is noteworthy that in the 2019 general elections, the historic gap between male and female turnout disappeared. Predictions for India’s upcoming 2024 general elections suggest that this trend is likely to continue.
Although the gap between male and female voter turnout in India has been gradually shrinking, the convergence in electoral participation is nevertheless surprising for multiple reasons. First, the increase in female turnout in India is occurring while female labour force participation — an important driver of women’s political participation — remains low compared to peer economies. Second, national-level data from Lokniti-CSDS National Election Study (NES) and other smaller studies confirms that women lag men across all measures of non-electoral political engagement, such as contacting elected representatives, attending public meetings, and participating in campaign activities. Third, women continue to be underrepresented in India’s Parliament and its state assemblies.
Therefore, the increase in female turnout in what remains a largely male-dominated political arena raises two important questions. Why is women’s turnout rising? And what impact might this have on electoral dynamics as India heads into the 2024 general elections?
The upward trend in female turnout in India is likely a result of several factors at both individual and institutional levels. The self-empowerment hypothesis posits that rising literacy levels and media exposure have increased awareness among women who, in turn, feel more empowered to exercise political agency. Utilising NES survey data, at least two studies found a positive correlation between women’s turnout and factors such as political knowledge, literacy, and media exposure. Another study draws on official turnout data across state and national elections to argue that the shifting trend is due to greater voluntary participation of women voters.
The self-empowerment hypothesis itself is nested within traditional resource-based theories of female participation in electoral and non-electoral forms of political engagement. These theories, originating in the West, argue that as women gain access to material resources — thanks to expanded literacy, financial autonomy, and greater information availability — they are likely to increase their political engagement. However, in India, this explanation is complicated by the fact that female turnout rose even as female labour force participation declined. Therefore, while the self-empowerment hypothesis is a good start, it cannot fully explain the dramatic rise in turnout.
In contrast, many observers have argued that institutional factors better explain the rise in female turnout. In 2009, the Election Commission of India (ECI) inaugurated the Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation programme. A key objective of the programme was to increase female turnout and close the voting gender gap. Although a systematic study of the programme has not been conducted, the upward trajectory in female turnout clearly begins in 2009.
Although ECI’s efforts have likely aided women’s turnout, women remain underrepresented on the country’s electoral rolls. One way of assessing this is to calculate the electoral sex ratio (ESR), which is the ratio of female electors to male electors. While India’s national ESR of 948 women per 1,000 men is in line with the skewed adult sex ratio (943 women per 1,000 men), multiple constituencies report much lower ESRs, implying that many women remain missing from the registration process. Therefore, it is likely that both individual and institutional factors are jointly responsible for observed shifts in electoral participation.
Irrespective of the reasons for the surge in female turnout, political parties across the spectrum have made serious efforts to attract the female vote. For instance, some have argued that an important reason the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an overwhelming majority in last year’s Madhya Pradesh assembly elections was the popularity of its Ladli Behna scheme, which promised a ₹1,000 cash hand-out to women. Similarly, the central government implemented schemes such as Ujjwala Yojana, which provides subsidised gas cylinders to women from poor households. Furthermore, in September 2023, Parliament passed a women’s reservation bill, which mandated that one-third of legislative seats in state and national assemblies be reserved for women in the future.
Regional parties have also enthusiastically wooed female voters. In 2006, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar increased gender quotas in local government bodies from 33% to 50%. Later, in a bid to improve female enrolment in secondary schools, Kumar introduced a scheme that granted female students who finished Class 8 ₹2,000 to purchase bicycles. More famously, in 2016, Kumar’s government instituted a total prohibition on alcohol.
Similar “pro-women” policies have been enacted in West Bengal, where chief minister Mamata Banerjee implemented a bicycle scheme for women and increased compensation for grassroots female government workers. It is notable that many of the schemes being touted as “pro-women” are premised on the idea of women as caregivers preoccupied by domestic responsibilities who supposedly need to be protected. While the causal relationship between women-centric welfare schemes and electoral success is not conclusive, it is clear that political parties are ramping up their outreach to female voters.
The study of gender in politics in India is often limited to evaluating the gender imbalance in voting. While important, this scope is excessively narrow, for at least two reasons. First, political engagement predominantly occurs between elections and is marked by repeated contact with the state. Moreover, the dearth of granular data on female political engagement means it is difficult to generate larger insights on women as political actors and their underlying motivations.
To overcome these limitations, I conducted two surveys of female citizens in rural Bihar to collect comprehensive data on contextually sensitive measures of female political engagement. The 2022 survey sampled 1,900 women in rural Bihar and collected data on female political engagement. The 2023 survey randomly sampled 642 women from the 2022 survey and collected additional data on their perceptions of barriers to female political engagement using a vignette experiment. Data from these surveys, combined with the 2009 and 2014 NES, reveal three key results on female electoral participation.
Restrictions on women’s mobility and public presence, including their political engagement, are quite common within Indian households. In patriarchal contexts characterised by gender-biased norms, a woman’s own family members might restrict her presence in public spaces to uphold conservative norms. Therefore, in the presence of gatekeepers, women might exhibit lower levels of political engagement.
In a face-to-face survey experiment in Bihar, respondents were shown a vignette about the household structure of a hypothetical woman living in their neighbourhood. The vignette randomly varied the household structure by modifying the presence of gatekeepers within this hypothetical woman’s household. Respondents were then asked to identify an individual within the household who was likely to engage in a randomly chosen political engagement activity, such as registering for a voter card, attending a village meeting related to a family dispute, or going to court for a hearing about the theft of a bike from a household.
Averaging across all household scenarios with and without gatekeepers, other family members (such as a woman’s husband, her in-laws, or her teenage son) were nearly 25% more likely to be selected over the woman featured in the vignette to represent the household at a village meeting or in court.
Interestingly, this finding did not extend to registering a voter card: women were 20% more likely than their gatekeepers to register themselves. This finding confirms that gatekeeping severely restricts the ability of women to participate in the political arena. But it also suggests that, compared to other forms of engagement, gatekeeping is less pronounced in the case of voting. This finding implies that gatekeeping norms have a relatively muted effect on electoral participation, compared to their strong effect on other forms of political engagement.
As discussed earlier, parties across the political spectrum have pursued policies to attract female voters. The BJP’s outreach has centered around mobilising women through norm-compliant strategies that focus on their care-related responsibilities. In particular, Narendra Modi has exalted himself as the provider for women and their welfare. Fieldwork in northern Bihar revealed that women who might not know the names of their mukhiya (village head) or state chief minister were readily able to identify Modi.
The survey also included questions that attempted to systematically measure the extent of women’s political knowledge. For example, one survey question asked women to name their state chief minister. Around 30% of respondents were able to correctly identify Nitish Kumar, but over 18% incorrectly named Modi as Bihar chief minister and a majority were unable to answer. The BJP’s strategy of promoting Modi as the face of the party in both national and state elections is creating a widely-held perception that the PM is the key political figure at both the federal and sub-national levels.
The BJP’s dominance over political discourse was further solidified when female respondents were asked to identify the party in power in Bihar and only 1.6% of respondents correctly identified the JD(U)-BJP coalition. However, almost 35% of respondents identified only the BJP (or kamal) as the primary party in power. Despite the JD(U) being the party of the state CM, fewer than 2% respondents correctly identified it as the primary party in power. While these results might not directly answer whether the BJP is disproportionately benefiting from women-centric welfare policies, they signal that the BJP’s visibility far surpasses that of other local parties active in the state.
While the growth in female turnout is a welcome development, women exercise much less agency than men when it comes to their vote choice. The NES survey asks voters to name who had the most influence on their voting decision. In both 2009 and 2014, roughly 55% of women on average reported making the decision themselves compared to 70% of men. Men were more likely to rely on a mix of family and other network members. In contrast, women — who typically have smaller social networks — relied more heavily on household members, particularly their spouses, to make this decision.
Looking ahead at the 2024 elections
Female voters have become a formidable force in Indian elections. Now more than ever, political parties have made women a central preoccupation of both their electoral campaigns as well as their governing strategies once in office.
However, the euphoria over female turnout must be placed within a broader social context. Despite rising female voter participation, the number of female candidates fielded by major parties in this year’s elections remains low. In 2019, female candidates made up less than one-tenth (8.9%) of the overall candidate pool — a record high, but still paltry.
Moreover, the rise in female turnout is occurring alongside an underwhelming female labour force participation rate and a persistent gender gap in many forms of political engagement. According to my own survey data, when asked about the key issues facing their village, women identified the dearth of employment opportunities almost as often as the need for clean drinking water — a well-known female-centric public good.
Therefore, parties’ discourse on women is excessively one-dimensional. It views women as caregivers and individuals who must be provided for. This not only entrenches patriarchal thinking, but it also fails to create a separate identity for women outside the household. For women to participate as equal citizens in society, strategies to improve women’s voter turnout must also be accompanied by consistent efforts to improve female autonomy across social, political, and economic arenas.
Rithika Kumar is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Beginning in fall 2024, she will be an assistant professor of political science at Rice University.
In the weeks ahead, the Carnegie-HT “India Elects 2024” series will analyse various dimensions of India’s upcoming election battle. Keep up to date with the project here.