Does agency built through SHGs carry into elected office, and what helps when it meets structural pushback?
The question from practice
Women who had already demonstrated agency through SHGs and community leadership were expected to carry that agency into elected office. Practice showed otherwise. Even women with considerable prior agency met structural pushback once they entered formal positions of power.
Research objective
To test what enables elected women representatives to exercise effective agency in office, through three lines of intervention: technical knowledge of panchayat functions, funds and functionaries; understanding of gender, patriarchy and structural barriers; and networks among women representatives. The lines are being tested singly and in combination, to establish which arm, or which combination, changes what a woman representative can actually do.
What each partner brings
Stanford brings research design for a multi-arm study, methodological rigour and analytical capability. TriQuest brings the question, the cohorts of representatives, the relationships that make repeated measurement possible, and the reading of what happens between a training session and a gram sabha.
TriQuest linkage
This is the reference case for the TriQuest loop, and all three pathways are live.
The three-arm design itself came from practice.
Agency, association and success are being tested as distinct mechanisms rather than assumed.
Emerging learning has already identified gaps in the training of women representatives and opened space for more targeted engagement within public programmes, well before the study concludes.
Academic and policy space
The literature on women’s political representation in India has long established descriptive representation and its effects. This study addresses what follows election: the machinery of effective agency. For MoPR, state panchayati raj departments and SIRDs, it speaks directly to the design of capacity building for close to 1.4 million elected women representatives.