Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Soledad Artiz Prillaman — The Patriarchal Political Order - The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India

Friday, February 23, 2024

2:00pm - 4:00pm EST

Harvard University, Rm S153, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge MA

Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics

Commentator:
Anirvan Chowdhury, Harvard University

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. Specifically, her research addresses questions such as: What are the political consequences of development and development policies, particularly for women’s political behavior? How are minorities, specifically women, democratically represented and where do inequalities in political engagement persist and how are voter demands translated into policy and governance? In answering these questions, she utilizes mixed methods, including field experiments, surveys, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2017 and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Texas A&M University in 2011.

Anirvan Chowdhury, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He completed his PhD candidate at the Charles and Louise Travers department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Research Associate at the Center for the Politics of Development. Welcome to his website!

He studies the links between social norms and political participation with a focus on gender and religious conservatism in South Asia. His dissertation-based book project, Domesticating Politics: How Religiously Conservative Parties Mobilize Women in India proposes a theory of norm-compliant mobilization to explain how the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wields social and religious norms to mobilize women. He also explores the wider implications of this mobilization for women’s agency in conservative parties and movements, as well as the paradox of democratic backsliding amidst rising political participation in India. In conjunction with this, a complementary research agenda examines the origins and spread of religious conservatism, how regressive norms can be transformed to foster inclusion, and the effects of inclusion on the marginalized and historically entrenched groups.

His research has been generously supported by the APSA-NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the APSA Centennial Center’s Women and Politics Fund, the Weiss Family Fund, the J-PAL Governance Initiative, the University of Notre Dame’s Global Religion Research Initiative, the University of Gothenburg’s Governance and Local Development Program, and UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division, Insitute of South Asia Studies, Center for Contemporary India, and Center for Right-Wing Studies.