DONDENA Seminar - Tanushree Goyal

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"Representation from Below: The Grassroots Origins of Women’s Political Power in India"

SPEAKER : Tanushree Goyal

ABSTRACT:

After decades on the political sidelines, women are now at the heart of India’s development agenda. Political parties are placing them front and center: shaping platforms, driving mobilization, and crafting electoral appeals around their participation. Representation from Below trace show this transformation began far from the halls of power, and took root in local politics and rose upwards through party organization. It develops a new theory of inclusive party-building to explain how women in local politics transform party organizations to increase responsiveness and advance representation at the highest levels of politics. Drawing on fieldwork, original data, and experimental research, the book shows how women in local politics, responding to career incentives, began building grassroots chapters of women’s wings and recruiting other women into activism, quietly reshaping party structures from the ground up. As women became indispensable to electoral mobilization, party leaders responded strategically: adapting platforms, expanding welfare schemes, and opening paths to higher office. The book challenges the view that political parties stand in the way of women’s empowerment, or that women in deeply patriarchal systems lack agency. Instead, it highlights how the very constraints and spaces once defined by women’s marginalization: households, gender norms, and women-centered networks, become unlikely engines of democratic change. When parties are built inclusively from below through women’s participation, the ripple effects extend far beyond the local level, transforming national politics and offering lessons that resonate historically and well beyond India’s borders. 

BIO: 

Tanushree Goyal is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. A comparative political scientist, her research lies at the intersection of gender and politics and the political economy of development, with India as her primary empirical focus and extensions to other regions of the Global South. Methodologically, Goyal is a quantitative political scientist who grounds hypothesis generation, survey design, and data collection in fieldwork and qualitative insight. She combines tools of causal inference with original data, survey instruments designed with ethnographic sensibility, administrative records compiled at unprecedented scale, and AI-driven data analysis. Her research has been published in leading political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. It has been featured widely in national and international media, and she has contributed opinion editorials to The Indian Express. Her scholarship has been recognized with several of the discipline’s most prestigious awards, including the Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Award in Political Economy (2022), the Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy & Autocracy (2023), and the APSA Urban and Local Politics Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award (2025). She serves as an Associate Editor at World Politics and is a member of EGAP, J-PAL, and the United Kingdom’s Political Economy Group. Before joining Princeton, Goyal was a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Academy and a non-resident visiting fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oxford in 2021 as a member of Nuffield College, and a Research Master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam in 2016. Prior to transitioning to political science, she completed a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering.