Grassroots Party Activism-Based Theory of Descriptive Representation

Some of the most persistent gender inequalities worldwide are in political party positions, with male-dominant parties perpetuating inefficiencies that keep women out of politics. In developing countries, grassroots party activism constitutes a crucial political channel through which ordinary citizens become politicians and engage the state. While fewer women are activists, the gender gap in party activism has received less scholarly attention. Primary data from recent studies highlight gender gaps in more formalized forms of party activism (Auerbach and Thachil Reference Auerbach and Thachil2018; Brierley and Nathan Reference Brierley and Nathan2020; Goyal and Sells Reference Goyal and Sells2021), but this only scratches the tip of the iceberg. The majority of party activists are only informally affiliated with political parties and comprise the lowest hierarchy in the party organization. Such informal party agents are not mentioned in formal part lists, even when they have remained active in the party for several years.Footnote ⁷

Research on gender gaps in party activism is also sparse; however, research on women’s participation in electoral politics suggests that such supply-side factors as household barriers (Chhibber Reference Chhibber2002), domestic responsibilities (Iversen and Rosenbluth Reference Iversen and Rosenbluth2010), and lack of ambition (Lawless Reference Lawless2015) can pose barriers to women becoming party activists. For instance, conducting ethnographic research on women party workers in India, Bedi (Reference Bedi2016, 185) documents that politically active women in intergenerational and patrilocal households have to negotiate their domestic chores with other women family members in order to get approval to participate in party politics. Because activism brings various advantages to the family and the local community, it builds relational support for women’s political work. Women whose families are highly conservative or women who are unable to reduce their domestic burden, such as unmarried women or women with young children, are less likely to become party activists. In addition, the gendered nature of political socialization can depress women’s political ambition and self-esteem, making their activism less likely. Indeed, a sizeable minority of women activists that I interviewed mentioned that prior to becoming party activists they had “no politics in their life.” In contrast, men activists were more likely to mention being active in youth or student politics and were far more likely to become an activist before getting married.

In addition to these supply-side barriers, demand-side barriers further depress the recruitment of women as party activists. Male-dominant parties can gatekeep women out of political positions, although party recruitment is more important for women’s political selection and is considered the key reason for women’s political under-representation in a range of contexts (Krook Reference Krook2010; Lawless Reference Lawless2015). At the activist level, the gendered division of party activities can direct women to non-electoral work which is less valued by party leaders (Daby Reference Daby2021). This can reinforce women’s lack of trust in the sponsorship of male party leaders, and consequently make male party leaders less successful in recruiting women activists (Gulzar et al. Reference Gulzar, Pathak, Thompson and Toth2023; Preece, Stoddard, and Fisher Reference Preece, Stoddard and Fisher2016). Male-dominant parties and recruitment networks may also be unable to access social networks and spaces where women are active and autonomous participants, thereby ignoring women talent that can be incorporated into party politics.

The Natural Experiment of Randomized Gender Quotas

The randomized reserved-seats gender quotas in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) allow for causal inference. India’s gender reservation policy mandates that only women can contest elections in constituencies reserved for women, which are selected as-if-randomly. Unreserved constituencies are open to both men and women. The MCD has 272 wards that each elect a single councilor every 5 years through plurality rules, as shown in Figure 1. In 2017, half of the municipal constituencies were reserved for women through an as-if random process that involves reserving every second constituency from a serially ordered list of municipal constituencies; these serial numbers are in-turn as-if-randomly assigned. Many studies have used this design for the purpose of causal inference (Chattopadhyay and Duflo Reference Chattopadhyay and Duflo2004). Section A.1 of the Supplementary Material provides balance tests supporting the design’s internal validity.

Figure 1.

Gender Reservation in Delhi’s MCD 2017

Data

The study surveyed 1,664 low- to middle-income residents in 51 neighborhoods and 183 polling stations across 17 randomly selected municipal constituencies in Delhi, 9 in reserved wards and 8 in non-reserved wards, approximately 18 months after the 2017 municipal elections. This is among the few surveys to highlight measure political participation in an urban Indian setting. Section A.2 of the Supplementary Material details the sampling procedure and ethical considerations. Table 1 presents summary statistics showing gender gaps in resources, mobility, and political knowledge and participation, highlighting the existence of restrictive gender norms in Delhi, even with universal access to mobile phones. Women are less likely than men to independently own a mobile phone, require permission to attend political events, and are less likely to discuss politics with family and friends. It is striking that gender gaps in Delhi are larger than in rural parts of Uttar Pradesh (India’s poorest state) (Iyer and Mani Reference Iyer and Mani2019).

Table 1.

Gender Gaps in Politics

Note: For all variables, the data source is the first wave of the panel citizen survey ( $ N=1,664 $ ), except for the second variable and the third variable where the data source is the second wave ( $ N=1,304 $ , re-interview rate $ = $ 78%). All variables are dummies otherwise indicated and missing values are coded as missing. The difference column reports the t-test of differences in means between men and women. Standard errors are clustered at the constituency level. *** $ p<0.01 $ , ** $ p<0.05 $ , * $ p<0.10 $ .

The citizen survey includes measures of activist contact. The survey asks: “In the last municipal elections in 2017, did any party activist visit you personally?” Party activists contacted close to 7 million—60% of Delhi’s electorate in a span of 1 month. Yet, contact is not equal; women are 11.7 percentage points less likely than men to be contacted by party activists. No election survey has collected data on party activist gender. This survey introduces a new measure, asking respondents: “Do you remember whether the party worker(s) were mostly men or women or a group of men and women party activists?”Footnote ¹¹

Although marginally less interested in politics than men, women believe both that their vote is equally important and that they can influence MCD politics, echoing findings that the gender gap in political efficacy is less pronounced in the Global South. Women feel more capable of contesting elections than men. Yet, women remain less likely than men to know about and participate in politics. Only 11% of women could name their local representative, whereas a mere 2.9% know about gender quotas. Even among men, the knowledge of gender quotas is low. I add and average these measures to create the political knowledge index.

Gender gaps are the smallest on registering a complaint, which citizens can do from home, and, as expected, on electoral participation. Gender gaps in turnout have shrunk in India since 1990s. Administrative data also confirm that the gender gap in turnout is marginal in Delhi’s local elections (less than 2 percentage points). However, women are less likely than men to participate in political events and protests related to women’s and environmental issues. Note that non-electoral participation is self-reported and the gender gap may reflect gendered measurement bias, especially if men over-report and women under-report their political participation. Therefore, it is important to interpret this gender gap with this caveat. I add and average the civic measures to create the non-electoral participation index.

Empirical Strategy

Because vast majority of women only run for office in reserved constituencies, I follow convention (as in Beaman et al. Reference Beaman, Chattopadhyay, Duflo, Pande and Topalova2009) to report reduced form effects of mandated female candidacy in 2017. I run the following regressions:

(1) $$ \begin{array}{rl}{Y}_{ij}={\beta}_0+{\beta}_1{R}_j+{\epsilon}_1,& \end{array} $$

(2) $$ \begin{array}{rl}{Y}_{ij}={\beta}_2+{\beta}_3{R}_j+{\beta}_4{G}_{ij}+{\beta}_5{R}_j{G}_{ij}+{\epsilon}_1,& \end{array} $$

where $ {Y}_{ij} $ is the outcome of interest for respondent i in constituency j, $ {R}_j $ is the treatment and refers to the j constituency’s reservation status, and $ {G}_{ij} $ is the gender of the ith respondent in constituency j. The gender gap for an outcome is estimated by running a regression which includes an interaction between gender and reservation status of respondent i in constituency j as in Equation 2.

Technically, the treatment is the assignment of constituencies to gender reservations within a setting where quotas have been long introduced (quota shock is held constant). Note that the control group is not reserved in 2017 and the treatment group is reserved in 2017. Because there have been reservations in the past (since 1997), and these are orthogonal to reservations in the future, this comparison only provides contemporary effects of reservations and averages out over historical effects. Section A.1 of the Supplementary Material overviews the history of Delhi’s reservations. Qualitative evidence suggests that the effects of reservations on party activism persist and strengthen over time which means that causal estimates that I present here are under-estimates.

Substantively, the treatment is the assignment of an equal number of women as major party candidates as men. First, all major parties nominate candidates in all 272 constituencies, and out of 134 non-reserved districts, only five women ran as major-party nominees. Independent or small-party candidates are rarely successful. Second, because gender quotas are not rotated, but newly randomized and released only a few weeks prior to elections, candidates or parties cannot use past reservation status to strategically organize gendered recruiting efforts, as underscored by interviews. Candidates and incumbents cultivate and signal their grassroots support between elections, hoping to be rewarded with a party ticket at election time, which enables them to expand and engage their activist base during elections. Winning politicians strengthen their support base. It is important to note that like in most countries, electoral campaign period, and therefore the most intense activist recruitment period in India, lasts between 4 and 6 weeks.Footnote ¹² The vast majority of party activists and candidates are locally embedded in their constituencies and enter politics during campaigns. Sixty percent of residents report contact with party activists during elections, highlighting the concentration of activist–citizen interaction in this brief period. Evidence shows that campaigns conducted 3–4 weeks before elections significantly enhance voter turnout (Wantchekon Reference Wantchekon2003).

The estimates of interest are $ {\beta}_1 $ and $ {\beta}_5 $ , and the results do not include any controls for transparency. Section A.5.1 of the Supplementary Material shows that the results are robust to covariate adjustment. The results report robust standard errors clustered at the constituency level and are implemented in R. The clustered design is sufficiently powered (80%) to detect treatment effects as small as 6–10.3 percentage points with binary outcomes, assuming an intra-class correlation coefficient observed in the data that range from 0.001 to 0.03. I also report test statistics from wild cluster bootstrap procedures and a two-sided randomization inference test of zero treatment effects, which provides inference with correct size regardless of cluster or sample size.

Women’s Grassroots Party Activism

Table 2 presents the results corroborating support for H1. Column 1 constant indicates that 6.4% of non-reserved constituents are contacted by women activists. In stark contrast, citizens in reserved seats report approximately 2.4 times more contact with women activists than those in non-reserved constituencies. In other words, more than 15% of citizens in reserved constituencies reported being approached by women activists, indicating a fundamental change in the nature of who conducts ground campaign; these results lend strong support to the first argument.

Table 2.

Women Party Activists Are More Likely to Contact Citizens in Reserved Constituencies

Note: The interaction is between reserved 2017 and women respondent. Standard errors are clustered at the constituency level. *** $ p<0.01 $ , ** $ p<0.05 $ , * $ p<0.10 $ .

Column 2 reports the interaction of gender and reservation status, showing that both men and women are equally more likely to be contacted by women activists in reserved constituencies, indicating women activists canvass men as effectively as they canvass women. Women activists may find it easier to access men in public spaces or may work harder to access men. These results also suggest that women politicians are less likely to be using a gendered campaign strategy—that is, using men activists to contact men voters and women activists to contact women. If that were the case, one would expect the results to show women being contacted by women activists but not men.

Columns 3 and 4 report contact by men activists. In reserved constituencies, citizens have a substantially lower likelihood of being contacted by men. Precisely, 21.2% citizens report contact with men activists in non-reserved constituencies. However, in reserved constituencies, less than half as much, that is, only 8.5% report contact by men activists. It is noteworthy, that although fewer all-men activists are making contact in reserved constituencies, women citizens in reserved constituencies relative to men citizens in non-reserved constituencies are 7.7 percentage points more likely to be contacted by men activists. This finding shows that all-male activist groups that organize under the leadership of a female politician are better able to reach female voters. Men activists may feel forced to exert greater effort to reach out to women voters, or women leaders may direct contact at women voters. Women leaders may also select and recruit male activists who are capable of reaching women voters.

In contrast, columns 5 and 6 demonstrate a slight increase in contact by mixed-gender groups of activists, although it is statistically insignificant. Collectively, these results suggest that more all-women activist groups, and fewer all-men activist groups are mobilizing citizens where women are candidates. Moreover, in reserved constituencies, and therefore under a woman’s leadership, these fewer-all men groups conduct more outreach toward women relative to when these groups are active in non-reserved constituencies (under a man politician’s leadership).

Partisan Contact in Ground Campaigns

Table 3 reports that citizens in reserved constituencies receive a level of partisan contact equal to that in non-reserved constituencies. The point estimate is close to zero and is statistically insignificant. This indicates women and men have roughly the same canvassing capacity. However, the politician survey conducted in this study reveals the perception of women politicians as weak mobilizers is widespread among male peers. In the light of this bias against women, this finding offers an important policy implication: providing information about women’s door-to-door outreach effectiveness can change male misperceptions of women as weak campaigners, therefore lowering statistical bias. Such misperceptions hinder women’s abilities to secure party nominations and to deliver public services.

Table 3.

Women’s Door-to-Door Campaigns Contact Citizens as Effectively as Men’s Campaigns but More Equitably

Note: Standard errors are clustered at the constituency level. *** $ p<0.01 $ , ** $ p<0.05 $ , * $ p<0.10 $ .

In addition to conducting as much contact as men, women politicians halve the inequality in partisan contact, lending support to the second hypothesis. Column 2 shows that women in non-reserved constituencies are 15.7% less likely to be contacted by party activists than men. However, in reserved constituencies, this gender gap lowers by 7.7%. Each constituency has an electorate of about 20,000 women voters; thus, 1,540 additional women get contacted in reserved constituencies. This remarkable change is the effect of only one election cycle of reserved seats in 2017—the fifth cycle since the quota’s implementation. It is plausible that the effects are stronger with more contiguous years of reservations. Nevertheless, they indicate that reservations have an effect even in one election cycle (reserved in 2017 vs. not-reserved in 2017), even after the initial gains of quota adoptions have been realized, and accounting for the possibility that these effects average out over historical persistence.

The results in Tables 2 and 3 suggest that overall contact has remained intact, and that citizen contact with men activists has decreased in the same amount that citizen contact with women activists and with mixed groups has increased in reserved constituencies. What has changed is that in the status quo (under men’s representation), that is, non-reserved constituencies, men were more likely than women to be contacted by party activists. Under reserved constituencies, this imbalance or gender gap in party activist contact is decreased. So overall men citizens are receiving less contact, but it is because they were favored in the status quo. On net, it is not men citizens who are now worse off, but instead women, who were being ignored by party activists, are now better off.

Together the results in Tables 2 and 3 also offer preliminary insights as to whether women have increased the number of party activists (pathway one), or whether they have substituted men with women activists in their campaigns (pathway two), at least in the context of both formal and informal party activist recruitment observed in ground campaigns. Because overall contact has not increased (Table 3), and assuming that more party activists will increase contact to at least some extent (however minor), it means that women do not have bigger campaign organizations per se but have more women in their campaigns. Contact with men activists indeed has been substituted with women and mixed groups of activists (Table 2). Data from ground campaigns also lend support to the second pathway. It suggests that women do not necessarily have bigger campaign organizations than men but have more women in them.

Mobilizing Citizen’s Political Participation

The final premise suggests that receiving partisan contact is likely to increase citizens’ political participation. An ideal experiment to investigate this would cross-randomize real-time campaign manager outreach strategies in reserved and non-reserved constituencies. Lacking this ideal experiment, I use observational data to provide a preliminary test of whether partisan contact correlates with increase in political knowledge and participation.

Fieldwork informs my empirical strategy. My fieldwork suggests that candidates focus their contact efforts on their stronghold neighborhoods, considering factors such as caste, religion, and political affiliation. However, within these neighborhoods, they maximize outreach and are less selective in whom they engage with. To mitigate endogeneity bias stemming from candidate selection, I introduce a fixed effect at the highly localized, within-constituency neighborhood level. Within a neighborhood, there is an element of randomness in activist contact due to the densely populated and busy nature, as well as the lack of individual data for screening. This strategy, therefore, provides a robust empirical test of the correlation between contact and political engagement. Additionally, I include controls for individual-level variables, such as education, marital status, caste, religion, age, migrant status, home ownership, and employment, to account for potential correlations with being contacted. Section A.5.2 of the Supplementary Material presents results with and without controls, demonstrating bias reduction, and robustness is confirmed through two matching techniques: Mahalanobis distance and full propensity score matching using the MatchIt package in R.

Figure 2 demonstrates significant correlations between partisan contact and political knowledge, electoral participation, and civic engagement in both reserved and non-reserved constituencies, largely supporting the third hypothesis. The exception is non-reserved constituencies, where contact has limited impact on women’s political knowledge. While the point estimate for voting in non-reserved constituencies is substantively significant, it becomes marginally insignificant after controlling for numerous covariates. Fieldwork observations suggest that the nature of contact targeting women differs between reserved and non-reserved constituencies. Women may be encouraged to participate in politics and vote but may not benefit as significantly in terms of political knowledge in non-reserved constituencies. Additionally, preliminary analysis indicates weak to no differences in the effects of contact between women activists and men activists on political knowledge and participation. Please refer to Supplementary Tables A11 and A12 for these results. However, given the correlational nature of the analysis, these findings are preliminary and should be interpreted cautiously.

Figure 2.

Campaign Contact Is Correlated with Citizen’s Political Engagement

Note: The circle represents the point estimates of the dependent variable which is any partisan contact. The bars represent 95% (thinner) and 90% (thicker) confidence intervals. Robust standard errors are reported. Section A.5.2 of the Supplementary Material presents tabular results.

Evidence from the Politician Survey

To complement insights from the citizen survey, a politician survey was conducted in 2019–20, with 92 incumbent municipal politicians in Delhi. The survey is representative of municipal incumbents and has a response rate of 33% (see Supplementary Figure A5). Using data from this survey, I find that women politicians report having more women party activists in their networks. Asking politicians to name their top party activists, I find that 37% of women incumbents named a woman party activist compared to 16% men. The survey also asked politicians “Were your ground campaigns in the last MCD election comprised of mostly men or mostly women party activists?” Enumerators had the option to code “gender-balanced” on their screens, but it was not explicitly mentioned to avoid signaling cheap talk. In line with the theory, Figure 3 confirms that women politicians are much more likely than men to report having gender-balanced campaigns. Moreover, women politicians who are independent of their husbands are more likely to have balance as compared to those men who have captured quota positions by fielding their wives as candidates. These findings suggest that the male capture of gender reserved seats remains a barrier to realizing the full benefits of descriptive representation. A representative politician survey conducted in one of the most rural and poor Indian states, Bihar, which includes the same question finds similar results. See Supplementary Figure A13. However, it also shows no negative impact of male capture of reserved seats as far as use of women in campaigns is concerned.

Figure 3.

Women Politicians Report More Women Activists in Their Ground Campaigns

Note: The figure plots the response of 82 politicians who report their campaigns either balanced or mostly women, or mostly men, for three categories of politicians: women politicians ( $ N=30 $ ), husbands of women politicians who have captured quota seats and have answered the survey ( $ N=12 $ ), and men politicians ( $ N=40 $ ). Ten politicians did not respond to the question.

How do women recruit women party activists? Fieldwork interviews highlight that women politicians and aspiring candidates actively knock on doors, visit women-majority spaces, and convince women to partake in party politics. During fieldwork interviews, a woman politician articulated a clear expression of women’s demand-side push, configuring the household is both as a politically and materially confining space for women: “Women do not even come outside of the house. I took the women out of the four walls of the house.”

Women politicians were vocal about how they bring women into party activism. In contrast, men politicians were silent, and none of them mentioned explicitly exerting effort to recruit women activists. It is also noteworthy that no women politician credited “seeing” other women in politics as the reason for entering politics. Instead, women shared how someone “brought” or “connected” them into politics, for example, a political candidate asked them to canvass door-to-door during a campaign or they undertook a task that eventually paved the way for them to become a formal party official. For example, Neelam (all identifying information has been changed) started her activist career when a women candidate for a major party asked her to participate in the candidate’s campaign in the run-up to the local elections. Today, Neelam is a municipal politician herself and richly demonstrates the entire cycle of how citizens first become activists, mainly during elections, and then candidates:

Many women party activists have built extensive experience in problem-solving in their constituencies, and women politicians use their networks and access to spaces where women are more active such as healthcare centers, self-help groups, temples, NGOs, and neighborhood or school management committees to recruit active women talent. Aama describes her journey,

Evidence from Ground Campaigns

The gendered dynamics of grassroots activism are most clear in ground campaigns during door-to-door candidate canvassing. Based on observations made during several years of fieldwork in multiple sites and during both quota and non-quota elections in India, I present a stylized sketch of a ground campaign.Footnote ¹⁶ Door-to-door campaigns are candidate-centric and begin 4–6 weeks ahead of elections. Aspiring political candidates rely on the grassroots activist following they have developed over the years as well as the prestige of their party nomination to expand their activist following in the run-up to the elections. They understand their constituency’s socioeconomic backgrounds—class, caste, religion, and partisan—support at the neighborhood level and target their personal campaigns most intensely at neighborhoods that are electoral strongholds. They are also more likely to reach out to the same neighborhoods where they have campaigned previously.

In a door-to-door campaign, a group of 5–15 party activists, many times without the candidate, walks in a pre-selected neighborhood. Activists carry megaphones or play loud music from a vehicle to attract crowds. They then break into smaller groups, knocking on doors and talking to people gathered in public spaces or around small tea stalls or shops in residential areas or those who are standing on their porches or are out on their balconies.

During these campaigns, party activists engage in unscripted conversations with citizens and provide information about the candidate’s sociopolitical background, policy platform, and party affiliation. They tailor their conversations, emphasizing the aspects of the candidate profile—language, caste, or candidate’s family background—they believe may resonate with the voter or discuss how the candidate plans to address the dominant service issue facing the neighborhood. These conversations may be short, lasting only 3–5 minutes—or can become more in depth, lasting 15–20 minutes or longer. Party activists distribute calendars or pamphlets and save citizen’s personal information such as mobile or WhatsApp numbers, which they use to send reminders and invitations.

When men activists conduct these campaigns, they mobilize men because men dominate public spaces. In contrast, women’s campaigns featuring women activists find it easier to access women voters. For example, consider the following observations made during the campaigns of Delhi’s state elections in 2020:

In contrast, the campaign of a man candidate from the same party, comprised mainly of young men activists:

Evidence from Interviews with Party Activists

Fieldwork and interviews with 1,243 formal municipal constituency-level party activists in Delhi also reveal similarities and differences between parties and the type of women who become party activists. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first multi-party survey and the first survey of both men and women party activists conducted in any developing country. Supplementary Figure A6 provides the distribution of party activists across parties and gender. Most women party activists are married, middle-aged, and socially active in their local communities and associations. Majority of them join politics after getting married, unlike men many of whom enter politics before marriage. This implies that women have less experience in party politics than men despite being of a similar age. Fieldwork showed that there is also a noticeable difference in the locations where men and women party activists conduct their political activities. Men usually use their shops or public land, whereas women typically operate from their homes or NGO offices. This discrepancy highlights how gender-based resource access disparities shape the places where women engage in party activities and the limited visibility of their party activities.

The survey reveals three consistent findings across parties. First, the majority of party activists (over 80%) indicate that party recruitment is the primary factor that connects them to the party organization (Supplementary Figure A7). Second, women activists are more likely than men to report being recruited by women involved in local politics (Supplementary Figure A8). Qualitatively, constituencies that lack women politicians or have low levels of women’s electoral participation have less formalized and less active women’s party wings. Finally, women party activists are no more likely to have family members in politics than men in all three parties, suggesting that women who are recruited are not mere tokens or wives of men party members (Supplementary Figure A10).

The survey also highlights the differences in the quantity, quality, and characteristics of women party activists recruited across three major political parties. Echoing studies on party organization in India (Chhibber, Jensenius, and Suryanarayan Reference Chhibber, Jensenius and Suryanarayan2014), the BJP has the most organized and active network of women party activists, followed by the AAP and then the INC. BJP party women come from families that own small- to medium-sized enterprises. They are not only socially highly active in religious or neighborhood communities, but they are also active in planning social activities with other women party members, centered mainly but not exclusively on religion. In contrast, AAP party women are more involved in local problem-solving, particularly on education- or water-related concerns, but have fewer ties to other party members. AAP party women are also more likely to come from poor to lower-middle class backgrounds. Finally, the INC has least organized network of women activists. INC party women are wealthier but are the least engaged in party activities.

The survey underscores strong backlash and reluctance against women’s political participation. Party activists highlighted how the “patriarchal society” remains vehemently against women in politics. Household constraints and regressive gender norms were the top two reasons cited by more than 30% of men and women activists as strong barriers against women’s party activism. Furthermore, only 60 out of 550 activists mentioned experiencing role-model effects (Supplementary Figure A9). Majority of these mentioned national male leaders as role models. It is worth noting that no one mentioned local women (or men) leaders as role models. Even among this politically active group where role model effects are most likely, there was no evidence for the same. Instead, women party activists highlighted that their presence in politics is not welcomed as manifest in the high levels of harassment and violence they persistently experience when they conduct campaigns. They reported using persuasion, information, and service provision which helps them to allay concerns and fears that citizens have against women’s political leadership.

Together, the qualitative data from various sources (politicians, activists, and campaigns) and measurement techniques (direct observations and interviews) also allay the concern that the gender composition of campaigns has not changed, but instead men and women activists are equally present in reserved and non-reserved seats, but women are more effective under women’s leadership.