Explained : Women Politicians and Bureaucratic Politics in India and Its Impact

After being elected through quotas, how do female politicians navigate male-led bureaucracies, which continue to exert inordinate control over resource allocation for policy implementation? Despite a booming literature in the effects of gender quotas, we know little about how governance outcomes are shaped by interactions between politicians and bureaucrats, especially given bureaucratic cultures tend to be dominantly governed by men. In hierarchical administrative settings, village politicians need sub-district and district-level bureaucrats to implement policies, but these politicians do not have direct authority over the bureaucrats they rely on. When politicians cannot reward or sanction bureaucrats, what governs bureaucratic behavior and importantly, does it bias against women in politics? This book project argues that in under-resourced bureaucracies, bureaucrats’ biases and career incentives lead them to help politicians who bureaucrats perceive to have the most political capital to support bureaucrats’ own career goals–men from ethnic majority groups. Through survey experiments, descriptive data, qualitative work, and administrative data, this book shows how this dynamic plays out in India and creates structural inequalities in women’s ability to govern. While the growing literature on gender and politics elucidates how voters and political parties act as gatekeepers to women’s political advancements, this book provides the first theoretical and empirical account of how bureaucrats can undermine the success of female politicians. It further demonstrates the detrimental consequences of the bureaucracy not only on women’s career trajectories, but also on the constituencies they govern.

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About the speaker

Bhumi Purohit

Bhumi Purohit is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School. Her research focuses on gender politics, political behaviour, and the political economy of governance in India, with particular attention to the institutional and behavioural barriers that constrain women’s political representation and shape public service delivery. Her first book project, Gendered Bureaucratic Resistance: How Women Politicians Navigate the Bureaucracy, examines how bureaucratic incentives and explicit or implicit gender bias can generate resistance to policy implementation, with consequences for women leaders and governance outcomes. She also co-authors ongoing work on public financial management, state capacity, and service delivery in India. Bhumi previously held a postdoctoral position at Princeton SPIA, earned her PhD from UC Berkeley, and completed an MPhil in Modern South Asia at the University of Oxford.

Chair

Louise Tillin

Louise Tillin is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute. Her new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines the development of India’s ‘welfare state’ over the last century from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present. Her forthcoming edited collection (with Rob Jenkins), Deconstructing India’s Democracy: Essays in Honour of James Manor, will be published by Orient Blackswan in 2025. Her earlier books include Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States, edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015), Indian Federalism (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government, 2004 to 2014 (with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor) (New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2020).