In India, as in many democracies around the world, there has long been a discernible gender gap in citizens’ political participation. For decades, Indian men were significantly more likely to cast their ballots on election day compared to women. It is noteworthy, therefore, that in the country’s 2019 general election, the historic gap between male and female turnout came to an end; for the first time on record, women voters turned out to vote at higher rates than men (see figure 1). Predictions for India’s upcoming 2024 general election suggest that this trend is likely to continue.
Although the gap between male and female voter turnout in India has been gradually shrinking in recent years, the convergence in electoral participation is nevertheless surprising for multiple reasons. First, as noted by Franziska Roscher, the increase in female turnout in India is occurring while female labor force participation—an important driver of women’s political participation—remains low compared to peer economies. Second, national-level data from the National Election Study (NES), conducted by the Lokniti Program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and other smaller studies confirm that women lag men across all measures of nonelectoral political engagement. For instance, data from two separate primary surveys—conducted in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh by political scientists Soledad Prillaman and Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, respectively—demonstrate that while the gender gap in voter turnout has closed, gaps are all too visible in other forms of sustained political engagement, such as contacting elected representatives, attending public meetings, and participating in campaign activities. Third, women continue to be underrepresented in India’s national parliament and its state assemblies.
Therefore, the increase in female turnout in what remains a largely male-dominated political arena raises two important questions. Why is women’s turnout rising? And what impact might this have on electoral dynamics as India heads into the 2024 general elections?
Why Is Female Voter Turnout Rising?
The upward trend in female turnout in India is likely a result of several factors, operating both at the individual and institutional level. The self-empowerment hypothesis posits that rising literacy levels and media exposure have increased awareness among women who, in turn, feel more empowered to exercise their political agency. Utilizing survey data from the NES, at least two studies found a positive correlation between women’s turnout and factors such as political knowledge, literacy, and media exposure. Using data on male and female turnout across state and national elections over five decades, economists Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi also found evidence in favor of the self-empowerment hypothesis, both in traditionally “backward” and in relatively more developed Indian states. They argue that these trends are likely driven by the “voluntary participation of women voters in elections.”
The self-empowerment hypothesis itself is nested within traditional resource-based theories of female participation in electoral and nonelectoral forms of political engagement. These theories, originating in the West, argue that as women gain access to material resources thanks to expanded literacy, financial autonomy (through participation in the labor force), and greater information availability, they are likely to increase their political engagement. In other words, advancements in economic development are followed by a rise in female engagement in political arenas.
However, in India, this explanation is complicated by the fact that female turnout rose even as female labor force participation declined. In fact, recent research from both India and Pakistan argue that female political engagement in South Asia cannot be understood without examining the role of the household in facilitating female political engagement. While the self-empowerment hypothesis is a good start, it cannot fully explain dramatic rise in turnout.
In contrast, many observers have argued that institutional factors, such as the sustained effort by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to boost women’s electoral participation, better explain the rise in female turnout. In 2009, the ECI inaugurated the Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation program with the goal of increasing voter awareness and improving voter turnout. In fact, a key objective of the program was to increase female turnout and close the voting gender gap. Although a systematic study of the program has not been conducted, the upward trajectory in female turnout clearly begins in 2009 (see figure 1).
Although it is likely that the ECI’s efforts have aided women’s turnout, it is worth noting that women are underrepresented on the country’s electoral rolls. One way of assessing this is to calculate the electoral sex ratio (ESR), which is the ratio of female electors (who are registered to vote and whose names are on the voter rolls) to male electors. While India’s national ESR of 948 women per 1,000 men is in line with the underlying skewed adult sex ratio (of 943 women per 1,000 men), multiple constituencies report much lower ESRs, implying that many women remain missing from the registration process.
In fact, male migration might help to explain why the voter sex ratio sometimes tilts in favor of women: male migrants are often unable to cast their votes in state and national elections since they are living (often temporarily) away from home. The observed increase in women’s turnout could simply reflect this dynamic. However, it is more likely that multiple factors working together are responsible for shifts in electoral participation.
Political Parties Take Notice
Irrespective of the reasons for the surge in female turnout, political parties across the spectrum have taken notice and made serious efforts to attract the female vote. For instance, some observers have argued that an important reason the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an overwhelming majority in last year’s state assembly election in Madhya Pradesh was the popularity of its Ladali Behna scheme, which promised a 1,000-rupee cash handout to women. Similarly, the BJP central government has implemented schemes like Ujjwala Yojana, which provides subsidized gas cylinders—a clean source of cooking fuel—to women from poor households. Furthermore, in September 2023, Parliament passed a women’s reservation bill that mandates gender quotas in state and national assemblies. When the bill is implemented, one-third of legislative seats will be reserved for women.
Regional parties have also enthusiastically wooed female voters. Eight years before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government first came to power in 2014, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United)—known as the JD(U)—increased gender quotas in local government bodies from 33 to 50 percent. Later, in a bid to improve female enrollment in secondary schools, Kumar introduced a scheme that granted female students who finished class 8 a cash transfer of 2,000 rupees to purchase bicycles. More famously, in early 2016, Kumar’s government instituted a prohibition against alcohol, formally making Bihar a dry state. The measure fulfilled a promise Kumar made on the campaign trail after being lobbied by women to curb the liberal supply of alcohol in the state.
Similarly billed “pro-women” policies have been enacted in neighboring West Bengal, where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress has implemented a bicycle scheme for women and increased compensation for grassroots female government workers. Of course, it is notable that many of the schemes being touted as “pro-women” are premised on the idea of women as caregivers preoccupied by domestic responsibilities who supposedly need to be protected. While the causal relationship between women-centric welfare schemes and electoral success is not conclusive, it is clear that political parties are ramping up their outreach to female voters.
Unpacking Female Voter Turnout
The study of gender in politics in India is often limited to evaluating the gender imbalance in voting. While important, this scope is excessively narrow, for at least two reasons. First, political engagement predominantly occurs between elections and is marked by repeated contact with the state given how welfare provisions and government programs are administered. Moreover, the dearth of granular data on female political engagement means it is difficult to generate larger insights on women as political actors and their underlying motivations.
To overcome these limitations, the author conducted two surveys—in 2022 and 2023—of female citizens in rural Bihar to collect comprehensive data on contextually sensitive measures of female political engagement. The 2022 survey sampled 1,900 women in rural Bihar between January and March and collected data on female political engagement across a range of contextually sensitive measures. The 2023 survey, collected in June that year, randomly sampled a subset of 642 women from the 2022 survey and collected additional data on their perceptions of barriers to female political engagement using a vignette experiment. Data from these surveys, combined with the 2009 and 2014 NES, reveal three key results on female electoral participation.
Muted Gatekeeping Norms for Voting-Related Engagement
Restrictions on women’s mobility and public presence, including their political engagement, are quite common within Indian households. In patriarchal contexts characterized by gender-biased norms, a woman’s own family members—including her husband or in-laws—might gatekeep or restrict her presence in public spaces as a way to uphold conservative norms that look down upon female presence beyond the household. Therefore, in the presence of their gatekeepers, women might exhibit lower levels of political engagement.
In a face-to-face survey experiment (included within the 2023 survey) in Bihar, respondents were shown a vignette about the household structure of a hypothetical woman living in their neighborhood. The vignette randomly varied the household structure by modifying the presence of gatekeepers within this hypothetical woman’s household. Respondents were then asked to identify an individual within the household who was likely to engage in a randomly chosen political engagement activity, such as registering for a voter card, attending a village meeting related to a family dispute, or going to court for a hearing about the theft of a bike from a household. The activities were based on qualitative fieldwork within the community, and they included a range of electoral and nonelectoral repertoires in which citizens are routinely engaged.
Figure 2 presents the likelihood of the hypothetical woman being selected to carry out the specified political engagement activity over other gatekeepers in her household. Averaging across all household scenarios with and without gatekeepers, other family members (such as a woman’s husband, her in-laws, or her teenage son) were nearly 25 percent more likely to be selected over the woman featured in the vignette to represent the household at a village meeting or in court.
Interestingly, this finding did not extend to registering a voter card: women were 20 percent more likely than their gatekeepers to register themselves. This finding has two important implications. First, it confirms that gatekeeping severely restricts the ability of women to participate in the political arena as citizens. Second, it suggests that, compared to other forms of engagement, gatekeeping is less pronounced in the case of voting. This is an important finding that suggests that rising female voter turnout has possibly changed gatekeeping norms around electoral participation. Specifically, it implies that gatekeeping norms have a relatively muted effect on electoral participation, compared to their strong effect on other forms of political engagement.
BJP’s Electoral Symbol Dominates the Consciousness of Female Voters in Rural Bihar
As discussed earlier, parties across the political spectrum have pursued policies to attract female voters. The BJP’s outreach has centered around mobilizing women through norm-compliant strategies that focus on their care-related responsibilities. In particular, Modi has exalted himself as the provider for women and their welfare. As the prime minister recently remarked, “When mother and sisters are empowered, then the entire family is empowered. Therefore, the priority of the [government] is the welfare of mothers and sisters.” Fieldwork in northern Bihar revealed that women who might not know the names of their mukhiya (village leader) or state chief minister were readily able to identify Modi. While it was harder for them to correctly identify his position, female respondents would regularly say things like “Modi sarkar hai” (Modi is the government) or “Modi Bharat ke malik hai” (Modi is the leader of India).
The survey also included a battery of questions that attempted to systematically measure the extent of women’s political knowledge. For example, one survey question asked women to name their state chief minister. Around 30 percent of respondents were able to correctly identify Nitish Kumar, but over 18 percent incorrectly named Modi as Bihar chief minister (see figure 3). An overwhelming majority of respondents were unable to answer the question. These results suggest that the BJP’s Modi-centric marketing strategy is blurring the lines between local and national politics. The BJP’s strategy of promoting Modi as the face of the party in both national and state elections is creating a widely-held perception that the prime minister is the key political figure at both the federal and subnational levels.
The BJP’s dominance over political discourse was further solidified when female respondents were asked to identify the party in power in Bihar (right-hand panel of figure 3). When asked this question, only 1.6 percent of respondents correctly identified the JD(U)-BJP coalition as being in power. However, almost 35 percent of respondents identified only the BJP or kamal (the lotus flower, the BJP’s election symbol) as the primary party in power. Despite JD(U) being the regional heavyweight and party of the state chief minister, fewer than 2 percent of respondents correctly identified it as the primary party in power. While these results might not directly answer whether the BJP is disproportionately benefiting from women-centric welfare policies, they signal that—at least in the eyes of women in Bihar—Modi and the BJP’s visibility far surpasses that of other local parties active in the state.
Heterogeneity in Women’s Voting Decisions
While the growth in female turnout is a welcome development, women exercise much less agency than men when it comes to their vote choice. The NES survey asks voters to name who had the most influence on their voting decision. In both 2009 and 2014, roughly 55 percent of women on average reported making the decision themselves compared to 70 percent of men—reflecting a stark gender gap on this measure (see figure 4). Men were more likely to rely on a mix of family and other network members when deciding how to vote. In contrast, women—who typically have smaller social networks—relied more heavily on household members, particularly their spouses, to make this decision. In other words, the household influence on women’s lives extends to the political realm.
However, this specific measure of female agency—the ability to determine one’s vote choice—demonstrates significant variation across states (see figure 5). Women in the so-called Hindi heartland and in eastern India (in states like Odisha and West Bengal) are more likely to seek their spouse’s opinion. The variation women exhibit on this measure aligns closely with other indicators of female empowerment, such as experience with domestic violence and autonomy in household decisionmaking.
Looking Ahead at the 2024 Election
Female voters have become a formidable force in Indian elections. Now more than ever, political parties have made women a central preoccupation of both their electoral campaigns as well as their governing strategies once in office. With the eventual implementation of gender quotas in state and national legislatures, gender could become an important identity shaping electoral outcomes.
However, the euphoria over female turnout surpassing male turnout must be placed within a broader social context. Despite rising female voter participation, the number of female candidates fielded by major parties in this year’s election remains low. In 2019, female candidates made up less than one-tenth (8.9 percent) of the overall candidate pool—a record high, but still abysmally low.
Moreover, the rise in female turnout is occurring alongside a declining female labor force participation rate and a persistent gender gap in many other forms of political engagement (including the act of contesting elections as a candidate). According to the author’s own survey data, when asked about the key issues facing their village, women identified the dearth of employment opportunities almost as often as the need for clean drinking water—a well-known female-centric public good.
Therefore, parties’ discourse on women—on the campaign trail and in the corridors of power—is excessively one-dimensional. It views women as caregivers and individuals who must be provided for. This not only entrenches patriarchal thinking, but it also fails to create a separate identity for women outside the household. For women to participate as equal citizens in society, strategies to improve women’s voter turnout must also be accompanied by consistent efforts to improve female autonomy across social, political, and economic arenas.
In the months ahead, Carnegie scholars and contributors will be analyzing various dimensions of India’s upcoming election battle—including the role foreign policy plays and the evolution of conservative parties. Keep up to date with the project here.