Summer in the Field: Understanding Gender Politics in the Context of Clientelism and Social Networks in Hyderabad, India
What do we know about women’s political participation and their engagement with the government in urban democracies?
With increasing discourse on the need to increase women’s electoral and political participation, its impact on women’s policy preferences, public health services and promoting economic and social rights, there is a gap in understanding how women navigate complex political networks to be heard and to claim their space. Simultaneously, with rapid urbanization, research on how slum-dwellers interact with complex bureaucratic systems and the State in the Global South is flourishing. However, the gendered element of this interaction is severely understudied.
As a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Boston University, my research seeks to examine how women in urban slums communicate their policy preferences in the presence of political intermediaries and networks that are ubiquitous and male centric. To understand the role of social networks, I explore the presence of women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs). SHGs are microcredit groups made of 10-20 members, usually women, coming together for economic and social empowerment. As of 2023, India has around 12 million SHGs and 88 percent of them are exclusive to women. SHGs have also been shown to improve women’s political participation by providing women with avenues to build political networks and create institutionalized spaces to increase social ties within patriarchal societies.
My research builds on my previous work where I found that SHGs actively make claims to the state on behalf of their communities – be it issues related to drainage, water supply or electricity, going to the police to settle disputes in the slum or even meeting politicians. I also found that the government recognizes the potential for problem-solving and policy implementation through these groups. For example, SHGs were instrumental in conducting door-to-door surveys on household statuses on COVID-19 vaccinations, monitoring vaccination camps, etc. in Hyderabad. The World Bank also reported similar trends on the crucial role that SHGs played in other parts of the country. Therefore, my research seeks to understand the potential of SHGs and their leaders as political intermediaries parallel to the existing male-centric ones.
My 2024 Summer in the Field Fellowship allowed me to better understand the role of SHG leaders as channels of communication between the state and women and how they work in the presence of existing problem-solving networks of slum leaders that are usually male and affiliated with political parties. In the larger picture, I also sought to understand the gendered gatekeeping of politics.
A crucial part of my fieldwork was to shadow SHGs. I was able to sit in and observe one of the SHGs’ monthly meetings that are mandated by the state. Members of 10-20 SHGs in a ward, an administrative unit which comprises of several slums, form a Slum-Level Federation and meet to address issues related to loans, small business investments and educating members on business strategies. However, what was interesting is that a significant portion of the meeting was run by a social worker who talked about the state’s initiatives for women. These included free driving lessons and licenses, free computer courses, discussing issues of public schools and education and even counselling sessions for children who suffer from drug abuse and alcoholism. Most of the conversation among the women revolved around children’s education and well-being, and their families’ health and showed that the group provides an institutionalized space for women to find strength in numbers.
To better understand the gender politics at play, I conducted surveys across 15 slums in the city. I built a research team of eight young women, all undergraduate students in the city, and trained them on survey data collection. I conducted two pilot surveys before launching the final version of my survey, which ultimately surveyed 400 people.
The survey aimed at understanding what people view to be the biggest issues with public services in their respective slums and who they reach out to when these problems occur. The options we included for points of contact included family (to learn if there are designated family roles for problem solving), neighbors (to foster collective action), slum leaders, SHG leaders and government officials.
Additionally, to understand more about informal leadership, we also interviewed people on whom they recognize as the most important person in their area and that person’s gender. Preliminary results show that about 70 percent of the participants identified a male slum leader as their go-to person.
We also used a choice experiment by presenting different profiles of hypothetical people to understand if respondents were more likely to prefer representatives of their community by gender or political affiliation. I aim to analyze all the data I collected over the summer in the next few months, alongside going back for in-depth conversations with SHG leaders and surveyed slum residents.
Conducting fieldwork and interacting with people on the ground has given me new questions and directions to explore in thinking about women’s informal descriptive representation. It also allowed me to explore, expand and deepen my own grounding in research, my methodological leanings and reflexivity.
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Learn more about the Summer in the Field Fellowship Program.