Book Project: Domesticating Politics: How Religiously Conservative Parties Mobilize Women in India (You can find a paper version of the argument])

Across the democratic world, religious and conservative parties must navigate a delicate line as they encourage women to participate in politics. On the one hand, their party ideologies and branding allude to a time when women were not supposed to play an active role in civic engagement. But on the other hand, electoral pressures and universal adult franchise compels them to mobilize women. Frequently, this mobilization can challenge patriarchal norms governing women’s behavior, threaten men’s authority within the family, and even undermine the party’s own ideology. Yet a large number of religiously conservative parties have—across time and space—enjoyed considerable success in mobilizing women voters. How do these parties navigate this delicate line?

I formulate an ethnographically derived theory of norm-compliant mobilization to explain how religiously conservative parties can mobilize women without disrupting established power hierarchies within the family, party, or society. This theory, grounded in the context of patriarchal societies where women are associated with domestic roles, posits that framing political engagement within the bounds of traditional gender norms can, perhaps counterintuitively, reduce the costs associated with women’s participation. In doing so, this “domestication of politics” not only secures social and familial approval for women’s public involvement but also mitigates the perceived threat to household power dynamics and the prevailing patriarchal order.

I test this theory using the case of women’s rising activism for India’s religiously conservative and right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). To understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, I undertook a multi-method approach combining (a) an immersive 14 months of qualitative research (participant observation, shadowing, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions) with more than 150 politicians, party activists, and voters, (b) an original computational text analysis of half a million social media posts, and (c) surveys and experiments with 128 party activists. By triangulating evidence from these qualitative and quantitative analyses, I demonstrate that the BJP’s remarkable success in mobilizing women stems from its framing of politics as seva, a powerful norm of selfless service. Notably, this norm also describes women’s caregiving roles as mothers and wives within the home. Consequently, framing politics as seva extends women’s private roles into the public domain, aligning them with traditional gender norms.

Subsequently, to quantify the effectiveness of this norm-compliant mobilization strategy, I designed and administered a series of discrete choice and political communication experiments with 2,914 citizens across 1,457 households, each comprising both a woman and a man. Results indicate that not only are women more inclined to engage with political parties when appeals are framed in norm-compliant terms, but crucially, male gatekeepers exhibit greater acceptance of women’s participation in politics when presented within this normative framework.

While my primary analysis focuses on India, my argument extends to several contexts where patriarchal norms limit women’s mobility. Drawing on contemporary case studies on Turkey, Lebanon, Indonesia, and comparative historical studies of Weimar Germany, the UK, and the US, I illustrate how the tools of norm-compliant mobilization have been instrumental for conservative parties and religious movements seeking to engage women across diverse traditions.

Finally, I examine the implications of norm-compliant mobilization for women’s agency, and for democratic practice. I find, through extensive qualitative fieldwork that seva enhances women’s mobility and helps activists gain a public identity. Moreover, because women serve society by occupying a position of power, seva reverses power hierarchies between the private and public spheres, allowing women a modicum of agency. Yet, the norm-compliant nature of seva and its inherent feminine-identified qualities of sacrifice and selflessness constrains the pursuit of political ambition and women’s civic engagement continues to be subject to the approval of gatekeepers within the home and the party.

In concluding, I draw attention to an important but understudied puzzle. Much empirical research implicitly assumes political participation to be positively associated with democratic deepening. Yet, the Indian case of democratic erosion amidst rising engagement belies this. Using data from the World Values Survey, my book shows that the answer to this puzzle can partially be found in the increased deployment of norm-compliant mobilization as a strategy of political engagement and recruitment. Because this is not antagonistic to existing power structures, it crowds out assertive models of engagement that prioritize individuals’ rights, voices, and seeking accountability which are features of resilient democracies. Hence, the mechanisms that enable the inclusion of marginalized groups in the world’s largest democracy can help us understand political transformations in other countries as conservative, right-wing, populist, and nationalist movements gain traction across the globe.