Tanushree Goyal

I am an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. My research lies at the intersection of Comparative Politics, Gender and Politics, and the Political Economy of Development. I am interested in understanding the cause and consequences of gender inequality, and in analyzing institutional interventions that lower gender disparities. My work leverages a range of research designs and data sources, including natural experiments, large-scale surveys, ethnographic research, and administrative data.

Previously, I was a post-doctoral scholar at the Harvard Academy. I am affiliated as a non-resident visiting fellow with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, UPenn. I completed my PhD in Political Science in 2021 at the University of Oxford, where I was a member of Nuffield College.

Representation from Below: The Grassroots Origins of Women's Political Power Book conference: Dec 2022 Harvard Academy. [Abstract]

1. Goyal T. 2024 Local political representation as a pathway to power: A natural experiment in India American Journal of Political Science 00 1-15. [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. 2023 Descriptive Representation and Party Building: Evidence from Municipal Governments in Brazil American Political Science Review 0:0 1-16. [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. Not my role model: How gender norms overtun symbolic effects [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.
    
2. Is Ethnic Violence Self-Perpetuating? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Hindu-Muslim Riots in India (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. 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.
    
4. 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.