Working Papers

Political gender gaps are particularly large in developing countries. Though developing countries are rapidly urbanizing, evidence on urban gender gaps remains scarce and almost entirely omits those residing in slums. This article proposes and tests a framework explaining how gender and informality intersect to create distinctive political behavior patterns in informal urban areas. Drawing on original interviews with slum residents, I argue that in slums the coordinating unit of women’s political life shifts from the household to the neighborhood, where fused domestic and communal space enlists women in collective, brokered mobilization. I test my expectations with original household survey and social networks data from over 10,000 households across three Indian cities. I show women are as embedded in neighborhood clientelistic networks as men and just as active in communal mobilization efforts to improve neighborhood outcomes. This article advances an understanding of how urbanization affects gender gaps in the Global South.

Urban economic growth is often associated with transformation in the name of development. However, to build new roads or create green space, city planners transform the preexisting urban environment, often displacing cities’ most vulnerable residents. As developing countries rapidly urbanize, millions of residents of informal settlements are at risk of eviction each year, often without advance notice or alternate arrangements upon displacement. Despite the important consequences of these trends, there is strikingly little quantitative evidence on which settlements governments displace in the name of modernization and why. This article investigates displacement in the case of Patna, Bihar, India. We combine a unique set of five data sources to empirically assess which prevailing theoretical explanations for displacement best explain eviction patterns. These sources include administrative surveys of urban slums, pre-eviction original household surveys with slum residents, repeated post-eviction interviews with key informants from the same settlements, panel analysis of satellite images, and novel geospatial data on local economic activity. Our findings reveal that officials primarily targeted the poorest settlements located on the least economically valuable land for displacement, and up to four years after displacement these areas have rarely been redeveloped. Eviction orders were carried out by officials from higher administrative levels, and local political connections did not prevent evictions. We argue our findings collectively support the logic that higher-level officials order evictions to assert their authority in a context of complex overlapping jurisdictions, rather than for economic development purposes. Future scholarship should continue to empirically examine how local political and economic factors can produce divergent displacement patterns across cities.

Working women participate more in public life than non-working women, making entry into the labor force a critical pathway to women’s political incorporation. Yet women’s employment has stalled in many low- and middle-income economies, despite many women wanting paid work. We argue that economic risk is a missing microfoundation in explanations of this gap. Economic risk is the defining feature of informal employment, which is the most common form of work worldwide. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and original survey experiments in urban India, we show that households are highly averse to wage volatility and termination risk when evaluating women’s potential jobs. Preferences for low-risk jobs are as strong as, and often stronger than, preferences for gender-norm-compliant features emphasized in prior research. By centering risk as a constraint on women’s entry into the public sphere through employment, we extend theories of work and political incorporation to informal economies.

Climate change has highly unequal consequences for vulnerable populations in the Global South, yet we know little about how these residents perceive climate change or make environmental political demands. We examine a puzzle from the slums of Jaipur, India: residents are widely exposed to and worried about hazards like extreme heat, are otherwise active claim-makers, but rarely prioritize or make claims about environmental issues. Drawing on 20 interviews adopting a novel card-ranking and heat-adaptation exercise, complemented by a survey of 900 households across 30 settlements, we find hazard experience and worry are pervasive but scientific climate knowledge low — and environmental issues are near the bottom of residents’ priorities and claims. We introduce solution awareness — knowing a locally relevant remedy, attributing it to the state, and believing it could work — as a crucial mechanism linking concern to demands: when shown concrete options, most residents revise their demands to include climate adaptation.

Scholars have long argued that urbanization will transform women’s political participation, yet they have largely overlooked a defining feature of contemporary urban growth—informality. Separately, the rich literature on everyday politics in informal settlements has said little about gender. Bridging these literatures, we ask how gender organizes political life in the informal city, highlighting puzzles about how contemporary urbanization trends may augment some forms of women’s participation while diminishing others. Drawing on an original, multi-wave data collection effort of surveys of over 10,000 households in informal settlements across Bengaluru, Jaipur, and Patna, fielded between 2015 and 2023, we present descriptive evidence on where we do and do not observe gender gaps across multiple domains that structure everyday slum politics: resources and networks, policy preferences, voting, claim-making, and community leadership. Descriptively, gender gaps are not uniform but track the structure of the political act: where engagement is collective, local, and mediated through community brokers, gaps are negligible; where it requires autonomy, movement beyond the settlement, or engaging public authorities, they widen. Our aim is less to settle questions about gender and informal politics than to open them: we map what current data can describe and outline a broader agenda for comparative scholarship on gender and everyday politics in rapidly urbanizing democracies.

Nearly one-sixth of humanity live in urban “slums” — neighborhoods that lack access to secure property rights and basic services — and this number is increasing rapidly as developing countries continue to urbanize. Despite their proximity to public servants and public services, slum residents remain largely disconnected from formal institutions. On top of exclusion from government resources, slum residents are also subjected to threats of displacement and financial exploitation from a range of both state and non-state actors. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, residents draw on informal political strategies to negotiate with the state for material improvements. Yet, despite a shared context of poverty and informality, residents of different slums vary considerably in how they engage politically. What explains differences in political behavior across settlements? Drawing on in-depth interviews with over 100 Indian slum residents and leaders, I propose a framework to explain how neighborhood characteristics shape political strategies across slum settlements. I argue slums vary along two key dimensions — access to formal resources (including, for example, property rights and identification documents) and strength of informal political networks — that are crucial for understanding whether and how residents negotiate with the state. I test this framework with original survey data from nearly 10,000 households from over 200 neighborhoods from Bengaluru, Jaipur, and Patna, India. These data comprise some of the most comprehensive data on Indian slums currently available to researchers. The findings not only have important implications for understanding development outcomes, but also for understanding how the urban poor understand and exercise their rights as citizens.

Mobile phone ownership has surged around the world. Estimates suggest nearly 69% of the world’s population subscribes to a mobile service. At the same time, gaps between men and women’s mobile phone ownership remains substantial. In 2020, 20 million more men were digitally connected than women. This gender digital divide—which refers to disparities between women and men’s access to and use of digital technologies, is observed virtually everywhere in the world, with the largest gulfs in low- and middle-income countries. These gaps have such powerful social, political and economic implications for women’s advancement that the United Nations’ under-secretary has declared the gender digital divide, the “new face of gender inequality” The potential benefits of cellphones make the reasons for widespread equity concerns apparent. Mobile phones play an important role in boosting economic opportunity and facilitating education and healthcare service delivery, among other important benefits (OECD 2018). At the same time, such advantages are mostly accessible to individuals with regular mobile phone access—phone owners.

While extant work examines the ways the gender digital divide stymies women’s economic empowerment (Roessler et al. 2021), researchers have completely overlooked the political consequences of this divide. We examine this lacuna. Specifically, we ask: How do gender gaps in cellphone ownership influence disparities in men’s and women’s civic and political participation?