Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament
- Submitting institution
-
University of Nottingham, The
- Unit of assessment
- 19 - Politics and International Studies
- Output identifier
- 1330871
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- ISBN
- 9780199489053
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This 151,000-word monograph offers an innovative theoretical framework combining performative and institutionalist approaches to political representation. It involved extensive data collection including elite interviews with MPs (1990s-2010s), and archival analysis of newspaper coverage, parliamentary records, and audio-visual recordings of debates and deep readings of selected debates. Analysis of debate texts and debate statistics, election and party candidate data, and parliamentary profile and Member biodata covered several parliaments. The research involved lengthy fieldwork visits to India over several years by both authors, including multiple visits to the national parliament library, election campaign shadowing, ethnographic analysis of parliaments, and interviews.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Co-author Rai's 2012 Political Studies article, 'The Politics of Access: Narratives of Women MPs in the Indian Parliament', appears as an appropriately amended chapter in the book. The 2012 article draws on interview data with Indian women MPs from the 1994 and 2004 parliaments by one of the co-authors, focusing specifically on women’s access to politics. The book’s interview data is much more extensive, incorporating interviews by both co-authors, spanning a longer time period (including the 2009 and 2014 parliaments), more women MPs, and many more issues and settings. Rai's 2012 article on access is only one of many issues explored in the book. The book’s institutional focus is parliament, a site discussed very briefly in the article, which instead focuses on the family, social movements, and parties. The article foregrounds narrative analysis, whereas the book adopts a combined performance and institutionalist approach.
Co-author Rai's 2015 Political Studies article on 'Political Performance: a Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics' details part of the book’s theoretical framework, but does not delve into institutionalist approaches to studying parliament, which forms a key theoretical frame in the book to interrogate the consequences of institutional rules and norms in parliament for women MPs’ participation and performance of representation. In the article, representation is only one element, whereas performance of representation is central to the book. The article does not centre the concept of gender, whereas this is a key thread throughout the book, examining parliament is a gendered institutional site. Thus the book offers many insights not offered by the article. The article only refers to some examples from the parliamentary setting, using almost entirely different empirical material compared to the book. The book develops the article’s framework further by combining with institutionalist approaches, and offers much more extensive and detailed empirical analysis.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
