Tanushree Goyal

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. My research sits at the intersection of comparative politics, development, gender, and political economy, with a particular focus on India and Brazil. I explore fundamental questions about institutions, culture, and democracy, including: What drives inequalities in access to political office and in political participation? How and under what conditions do decentralized political institutions enhance accountability, foster collective action, and drive systemic change to improve human welfare? How does culture shape politics, and can politics drive cultural change?

My work employs a diverse range of methodological approaches, including natural, survey, and field experiments, large-scale and long-form surveys, in-depth qualitative fieldwork, and high-resolution administrative data. My 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 also been widely covered in national and international media, and I have contributed opinion editorials to The Indian Express.

My scholarship has been recognized with some of the most prestigious awards in political science, including the Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Award in Political Economy (2022) and the Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy & Autocracy (2023). I serve as an Associate Editor at World Politics and I am a member of EGAP, J-PAL, and the UK’s Political Economy Group.

Before joining Princeton, I 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. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oxford in 2021 as a member of Nuffield College. Before transitioning to political science, I completed a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

Representation from Below: How Women in Local Politics Build Political Parties and Power in India [Abstract]

1. Goyal T. 2025 Local political representation as a pathway to power: A natural experiment in India American Journal of Political Science 69: 516–530. [Abstract]
   
   What drives the career advancement of female politicians in opaque selection environments where party activists hold sway? I argue that women's higher presence in local politics not only improves party elite responsiveness to greater talent supply (top-down mechanism) but also expands women's capacity to organize grassroots activist networks to influence party-nomination decisions (bottom-up mechanism). Using the natural experiment of gender quotas in Delhi, which cause as-if-random variation in the number of local reserved seats within state constituencies, I estimate a novel effect of gender quotas. In state constituencies with women's higher presence in local politics, local female politicians are more likely to be promoted, and senior female politicians are more likely to get renominated. Qualitative evidence shows how women leverage grassroots networks and forge informal connections across party hierarchies. The findings emphasize the pivotal role of women's strategic political networks and grassroots organizing in shaping their political careers.
   [Awards]
   
   King’s Quantitative Political Economy Seminar Award for Best Paper, 2021
    
2. Goyal T and Sells C. 2024 Descriptive Representation and Party Building: Evidence from Municipal Governments in Brazil American Political Science Review 118(4):1840-1855. [Abstract]
   
   This article highlights a new way in which descriptive representation enhances democracy through inclusive party building. We theorize that parties retain and promote incumbents based on gendered criteria, disproportionately incentivizing women to recruit party members. However, gendered resource inequalities lower women’s access to the patronage required for recruitment. Women respond by recruiting more women members, as it lowers recruitment costs, is role-congruent, and eases credit claiming. Using rich administrative data on party membership from 2004 to 2020 and a regression discontinuity design in Brazil, we find that, despite resource disparities, women mayors recruit new members at similar rates as men but reduce the gender gap in party membership. As expected, women are more likely to be promoted in constituencies where they most lower the gender gap in party membership. We also find that women’s increased membership improves party resilience. Our findings suggest that descriptive representation strengthens party building by including underrepresented citizens.
    
3. Goyal T. 2024 Representation from Below: How Women’s Grassroots Party Activism Promotes Equal Political Participation American Political Science Review 118(3), 1415–1430. [Abstract]
   
   Extensive research investigates the impact of descriptive representation on women’s political participation; yet, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This article develops a novel theory of descriptive representation, arguing that women politicians mobilize women’s political participation by recruiting women as grassroots party activists. Evidence from a citizen survey and the natural experiment of gender quotas in India confirm that women politicians are more likely to recruit women party activists, and citizens report greater contact with them in reserved constituencies during elections. Furthermore, with women party activists at the helm, electoral campaigns are more likely to contact women, and activist contact is positively associated with political knowledge and participation. Evidence from representative surveys of politicians and party activists and fieldwork in campaigns, further support the theory. The findings highlight the pivotal role of women’s party activism in shaping women’s political behavior, especially in contexts with pervasive clientelism and persistent gender unequal norms.
   [Awards]
   
   APSA Kauffman Foundation Award for Best Paper on Entrepreneurship and Inclusion, 2020
   [Media]
   
   Invited guest op-ed on Indian Express (here)
   Opinion Editorial Indian Express (link to online print) or (link to print image)
    
4. Goyal T. 2024 Do Citizens Enforce Accountability for Public Goods Provision? Evidence from India's Rural Roads Program Journal of Politics 86:1 97-112. [Abstract]
   
   This article investigates voter responsiveness to the world’s largest rural roads program, a highly visible development program that improved connectivity for one-third of humanity that previously lacked road access. Investigating 180,000 roads provided across half a million Indian villages aggregated across multiple elections over the last 20 years, the article finds that road provision fails to boost electoral support for the ruling party. Exploiting population-based implementation rules that partly determine road allocation, instrumental variable regressions show that voters remain unresponsive to exogenous road provision. Exploiting subnational variation in implementation and political alignment, analysis shows that factors that breakdown the accountability chain, such as quality, salience, myopia, corruption, or attribution concerns, do not explain these results. The findings suggest that weak accountability presents a more enduring challenge to democracy than assumed in theoretical models and policy interventions.
   [Media]
   
   Front page coverage on Economic Times during India's National Elections 2019 (here)
    

1. Increasing Polarization of Hindu-Muslim Identity in India (under review at Nature Human Behaviour, co-authored with Feyaad Aalie, Viktor Enssle, Saad Gulzar , and Gufran Pathan.) [Abstract]
   
   We document the long-term evolution of religious identity in India by analyzing the names of 505,309,697 Hindus and Muslims born between 1950 to 1995. We find that names increasingly signal a strong religious identity, showing heightened religious polarization. A preference for religious doctrine does not explain this rising polarization. Instead, we show how social dynamics generate asymmetric behaviors. First, Muslims are less likely to adopt Hindu names over time, while Hindus rarely use Muslim names. Second, polarization for Hindus is rooted in parents giving their children more distinct names than their own, while for Muslims, neighborhood factors such as segregation shape polarization. Going beyond accounts of rising religious fundamentalism in India, our findings highlight the differential social roots of Hindu and Muslim cultural practices.
    
2. Is Ethnic Violence Self-Perpetuating? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Hindu-Muslim Riots in India (Revise and Resumbit at the Journal of Conflict Resolution, co-authored with Sam Van Noort) [Abstract]
   
   Existing literature suggests that ethnic violence tends to be self-perpetuating. Testing this hypothesis is challenging as both past and current violence could be determined by the same underlying factors. To overcome this endogeneity problem we exploit the fact that the date of Hindu festivals in India is exogenously determined by the lunar calendar and that when a major Hindu festival falls on a Friday, the holy day for Muslims, the probability of Hindu-Muslim riots rises sharply. In line with the existing literature we nd that Hindu-Muslim riots are strongly serially correlated over the 1976 to 2001 period. Importantly, however, this effect disappears and becomes negative (and statistically insignificant) when employing the Hindu festivals instrument. These results suggest that ethnic violence does not cast a long shadow. Once the underlying factors that cause violence are resolved confict-ridden communities are no more likely than other communities to experience future violence.
    
3. How gender quotas undo backlash to women in politics [Abstract]
   
   Do female politicians serve as political role models in settings where traditional gender roles remain entrenched? I investigate the role model effects mechanism using a visual experiment conducted within the natural experiment of gender quotas in Delhi. The visual experiment exposes citizens to a realistic treatment - photographs that signal the gender of their as-if-randomly assigned representative. Women who see a woman politician's photograph experience a negative change in political efficacy, but only higher-caste women and those without extra-household connections. Findings suggest that women politicians threaten traditional identity, evoking backlash. Consequently, randomized information about gender quotas, by reconciling women's political presence with existing norms, neutralizes this backlash. Findings suggest that gender norms hinder symbolic effects, but, paradoxically, gender quotas lower backlash. The findings raise concerns about women's rising political presence given slow-moving gender norms and citizens' lack of awareness about gender quotas.
    
4. Do Voters in Local Elections Prefer Campaign Promises About Attributable Policies? (with Robin Harding) [Abstract]
   
   It is widely accepted that policy attribution increases retrospective accountability. We extend this research by outlining the theoretical importance of policy attribution in electoral selection and investigating whether voters select candidates based on campaign promises for attributable policy outcomes. Selecting candidates on attributable campaign promises can increase political responsiveness and lower pandering, representing an overlooked channel that can increase accountability. We introduce novel measures of attribution and conduct comparative conjoint experiments in representative surveys in Accra, Ghana, and New Delhi, India. We find that in both settings the quality of attribution is high and policy promises are the strongest determinant of vote choice. Yet, we find no evidence that voters prefer attributable campaign promises. Instead, voters are just as likely to select candidates based on campaign promises for policies they do not attribute to them. Our findings have important implications for the operation of accountability, and for justifications of decentralization.
    
5. Does Local Leadership Lower Bias in Law Enforcement? Evidence from Experiments with India’s Rural Politicians (with Sam Van Noort and Mats Ahrenshop) [Abstract]
   
   Do elected local representatives lower bias in law enforcement? We conducted four vignette experiments with a representative sample of rural politicians in Bihar. Each vignette randomly varies the gender and caste of a citizen in a law enforcement situation - enforcement of lockdown rules, inheritance law, land encroachment, and the open-defecation-free policy. We find that local representatives intervene to ensure citizens compliance and, regardless of their gender or caste, strongly discriminate against (minority) women but mainly in inheritance enforcement. Conversely, we find little evidence for overt caste or gender discrimination in non-gender-progressive vignettes. We find strikingly similar results on conducting the inheritance experiment with local politicians who have judicial powers. Data indicate entrenched gender norms as a key explanation for bias. The findings show that local leaders are unlikely to enforce progressive reforms that clash with entrenched gender norms, with implications for the study of decentralization and law enforcement in patriarchal rural settings.
    

1. POL 351: The Politics of Development, an undergraduate lecture course. I taught this course in Spring 2025.  
2. POL 357: Gender and Development, an undergraduate lecture course. I taught this course in Spring 2025, Spring 2023.  
3. SPI 300: Gender Gaps in Politics, an undergraduate seminar. I taught this course in Spring 2025, Spring 2023.