This thesis investigates the factors that affect women's bargaining power within the household, in India. The first chapter introduces the literature on household bargaining mostly by describing how household outcomes like children's health indicators and expenditure pattern change with increase in resources under women's control. The second chapter describes the conceptual framework for intra-household bargaining. It discusses the two broad topics – household bargaining models and gendered institutions, that can be used to identify avenues for increasing women's bargaining power within the household. In chapters three and four, I analyze the factors that determine women's power position, using data on women's involvement in household decision making from a nationally representative longitudinal household survey (India Human Development Survey). The survey was conducted in over 40,000 Indian households, which covers over 200,000 individuals. In the third chapter, I investigate the effect of women's labor force participation on her involvement in household decision making. After addressing the issues of endogeneity using a fixed effects model, I find that her labor market participation significantly increases her involvement in decision making process, which can be seen as a direct outcome of her increased bargaining power. In my fourth chapter I analyze whether the women's bargaining power within the household increases with the presence of female politicians at both state and local level. Studying the causal impact of a variable like female political representation is generally riddled with concerns of endogeneity for existence of voter preference. Using share of seats won by women in man-woman close elections as an instrument for overall female representation in in a fixed effect model, I show that an increase in number of female state legislators can actually lead to an increase in the bargaining power of women. This chapter further shows that increase in women's involvement in decision making process in the household is also associated with the female political representation at local level. The fifth chapter concludes the dissertation by making policy recommendation for strengthening women's bargaining position within the household. / Ph. D. / This thesis investigates the factors affecting women’s bargaining power within the household, in India. The first chapter introduces the literature on household bargaining mostly by discussing papers which find that more resources under the control of women within the household translates into lower fertility, better child health and education outcomes, thus establishing the significance of female bargaining power for overall economic development of countries like India which have poor social indicators. I also discuss some papers which contradict such findings. The second chapter describes the conceptual framework for the topic of intra-household bargaining. The first part of the chapter discusses the theoretical models of intra-household bargaining. While it is important to understand the theoretical models, it is also important to understand what form household bargaining takes in real life. To understand the power dynamics better, I conducted four Focus Group Discussion (FGD) in the state of West Bengal, India, in 2015. The participants were mostly married women of age 18-50. One of the main observations from the FGDs was that the deep-rooted gender roles for men and women in the society play an important role in determining their positions within the family. Drawing briefly on the observations from the FGD and existing literature on the topic, the second part of chapter two discusses how these gender roles can play a role in determining power position within the household. In the next two chapters, I analyze the factors that determine women’s power position using data on women’s involvement in the household decision making. This can be seen as a direct outcome of her bargaining power. The data used has been taken from a nationally representative longitudinal household survey (India Human Development Survey) of over 40,000 Indian households covering more than 200,000 individuals. The survey was conducted in two waves in the years 2004-05 and 2011-12. In my third chapter I investigate the effect of women’s labor force participation on her involvement in household decision making. After addressing the issues of endogeneity using a fixed effects model, I find that her labor market participation significantly increases her involvement in household decision making process. In my fourth chapter I analyze whether the women’s bargaining power within the household increases with the presence of female politicians at both state and local level. Studies, which use female representation in politics to explain various outcome variables, have often pointed out that due to the presence of voter preference it is difficult to estimate the actual causal effect. Hence for state elections, I use the existence of close elections as an instrument in a fixed effect model to show that an increase in number of female state legislators can actually lead to an increase in the bargaining power of women. To instrument for local level female representation, I use mandatory reservation for women in local elections and find a positive association between presence of a female village head and increase in women’s involvement in household decision making. On the basis of the results obtained in this study the fifth chapter concludes the dissertation by making policy recommendation for strengthening women’s bargaining position within the household.

This study set out to answer how and to what extent the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are addressed in parliamentary debates in the Southern African regional context. As both the proportion of women in parliament and the level of democracy have been established by previous research as important conditions for women to be able to act for women as a group, four countries with varying combinations of these factors are examined. By conducting both a quantitative and a qualitative text analysis on Hansards from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, the study analyses the extent to which the gendered effects of the pandemic are addressed and how they are addressed respectively. The results reveal that a combination of a high proportion of women in parliament and a high degree of democracy is the most favourable condition for enabling the substantive representation of women. A democracy with a low proportion of women in parliament is shown to be more allowing for the substantive representation of women than an electoral autocracy with a high proportion of women in parliament. Moreover, the qualitative frame analysis sheds light on the different issues which are in focus on the framing of the gendered effects of the pandemic in different parliaments depending on their level of democracy. Particularly, the issue of gender-based violence in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic is found to have reached the political agenda in the democratic cases, whereas MPs in the less democratic parliaments are more likely to feminize their cause by focusing more on traditionally feminine policy issues such as the health effects of women within the context of the pandemic.