Collective Action and Political Participation and Entry

Despite extensive use of political quotas, disadvantaged groups—especially women from low-caste and low-income backgrounds—remain underrepresented in Indian politics. This project investigates whether collective action can increase political engagement and aspirations among disadvantaged women. We leverage an existing experiment that randomizes women into ‘informal worker groups,’ which provide training and support for accessing their entitlements under a national workfare program. Preliminary findings show that these worker groups increased collective action by women and their access to workfare employment over the last three years. We now ask whether these gains extend into politics. Taking advantage of two upcoming elections—the 2025 Bihar assembly election and the 2026 village council election—we will combine survey data with unusually rich administrative records to study effects on political participation (turnout, voting behavior, and party linkages) and political entry (candidate selection, electoral success, and representation of women and low-caste groups). Together, these analyses provide rare causal evidence on whether bottom-up collective action opens new pathways into politics, addressing a central question in research on representation and political selection in developing democracies.