Welcome!

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I earned my PhD in political science at New York University.

My research interests center on gender and political participation, with a regional focus on India. My dissertation investigates when women in developing countries turn out at equal rates to men, even in the absence of resources such as education or income. Where families, not the state, provide security, turnout becomes a household decision, and ethnic competition can give household sreason to bring women to the polls. My other work asks whether women’s votes are genuinely their own, why women are more likely to be left off the electoral rolls, how social norms around gender shift, and what changes once women participate in force.

I employ a variety of methodological approaches in my research, including surveys, experiments, statistical analyses of large datasets, and qualitative interviews and observations. My dissertation combines several months of qualitative fieldwork with an original survey, hand-coded information on ethnic parties based on historical newspaper archives, and a newly assembled administrative dataset on turnout by gender to understand the factors affecting women’s political participation in India.

You can contact me at franziska ‘at’ gatech ‘dot’ edu. My CV is available here: CV